ABSTRACT
It is certainly instructive that the coining of the acronym BRICs, referring initially to Brazil, Russia, India and China, as emblematic of the purported twenty-first-century wave of “emerging market” economies, would spring from the research department of an investment bank – Goldman Sachs, no less (O’Neill 2001). The prediction that the mantle of “development” was being newly donned by a group of countries from the erstwhile Third World captivated not only the investment community but politicians and pundits around the globe. BRICs, soon to become BRICS with South Africa added in, was being marketed as a capitalist investment nirvana where the sweeping world economic prosperity, initially promised by architects of the “free world” in the aftermath of World War II (WWII), was on the cusp of consummation (Wilson and Purushothaman 2003). However, from the perspective of this introductory chapter to a book collection on the emerging market phenomenon, there exists in the BRICS story a massive dose of déjà-vu.
