Analysis

BRICS in 2025

Within the BRICS group, two competing global models of energy, growth, and influence. The future of the world’s majority will be decided by the pace of the contest between green technologies and fossil fuels.

Monetizing Primacy

On the question of the dollar, Trump administration policy can be characterized as confused. It wants a weak dollar to spur reindustrialization in the US and a strong dollar to offset any inflationary pass-through from tariffs. But it is also determined to retain the centrality of the dollar in the international monetary system, even though several key administration officials believe—mistakenly—that dollar centrality leads to undesirable dollar strength. 

Dismantling an Energy Giant

Since assuming office in May 2022, Costa Rican president Rodrigo Chaves has announced his intentions to revamp the country’s electricity sector. By October, his government had given private companies a more prominent role in the currently state-dominated energy sector, both in electricity generation and transmission.

Pay Equity at Kroger

After the Southern California supermarket strike of 2003–2004, Kroger Co. and the UFCW compromised on a two-tier provision preserving current employee benefits and pay, but reducing both for new hires. Since then UFCW locals have struggled to reverse the effects of the compromise. Generational divides and occupational segregation within and between grocery stores have handicapped worker solidarity in the supermarket industry.

Industrial Policy and Imperial Realignment

More than 2500 industrial policies were recorded in 2023, but they are being deployed asymmetrically across the global economy. The pace at which advanced economies and less-developed countries are adopting industrial policies is diverging, with the former better positioned to take advantage of the current period of turbulent change.

Argentina’s Debt Trap

After publicly endorsing Javier Milei’s economic achievements since coming to power in December 2023, the IMF has approved a new Argentine bailout package of $20 billion. This comes seven years after former President Mauricio Macri negotiated a $45 billion loan in 2018, of which not a single dollar has yet been repaid. Milei's reforms, in turn, have deepened the country’s cycle of debt dependency in an increasingly unstable global context.

Offshoring the Planet

The rise of green offshore finance threatens to encase biodiversity and climate policymaking within global South states and across the multilateral system, locking in a standardized set of biodiversity and climate financing, governance, and policy measures for decades to come.

America’s Braudelian Autumn

In its efforts to revive the American Empire, the Trump administration will have to delicately balance the interests of both manufacturing-oriented nativists and capital factions whose interests span the globe. Navigating these competing agendas will pose an enormous challenge to the longevity of the Trumpian coalition—and the stability of the global financial system as a whole. 

Capturing Production

The implementation of the USMCA in July 2020 heralded major changes for the North American automotive industry, with increased regional content and fundamental labor rights becoming requirements to gain entry into the North American market. While Mexico's wage objectives remain unmet, as does the goal of increased production in the US, cross-border coordination in the manufacturing and commercialization of EVs could benefit all regional actors under a renewed USMCA.

The Tariff Threat

Mexico's current model of integration is vulnerable to external shocks. In order to protect its industrial base and establish sovereignty over its economic development, and to sustain its position in international trade, the state will have to scale up high-value exports and strategically diversify. The tariff threat is merely a symptom of Mexico's need for more resilient supply chains.

After Impeachment

Ahead of a presidential election in June, Korea remains engulfed in political turmoil following the declaration of martial law and subsequent presidential impeachment back in December. A poster child of late twentieth century democratic transitions, hailed for its export-oriented growth model, Korea now confronts democratic backsliding and economic stagnation. A robust program of public investment is needed to shift this course. 

OPEC Plus

While OPEC's economic stratagem has always trumped the political orientation of some of its members, wide geopolitical shifts have diminished the role of some nations while allowing for new partnerships unimaginable in the twentieth century. As an expanded organization, OPEC+ continues to face both contingent and existential challenges. However, the fact that OPEC+ retains its solidity despite enormous internal differences and turbulent geopolitical conditions indicates the potential of international alliances of countries from the global South to endure in the changing world order.

A Class Coup

The struggle for rights of Brazilian workers, and its fierce public presence since the end of the Second World War, reached its apogee early in the 1960s. In a climate shaped by the Cold War, many in Brazil's middle and upper classes supported military dictatorship as alternative to the growing power of the country's labor unions. While the regime's conservative modernization initially proved to be as productive as it was repressive, millions of Brazilians who experienced this forced industrialization came to see themselves and their forms of political activity as workers, and it was through action as workers organized into unions that the popular demonstrations that shook the dictatorship began to grow.

Unbankable Transitions

It is only by looking at the whole picture of climate financing flows—and the other sectors and material demands of the green transition—that we can begin to reckon with the fundamental limitations of our existing climate governance regime.

Green Indicative Planning

With derisking regimes falling short of meeting governments' pledges to reach net zero carbon emissions, what lessons can we learn from governance through indicative planning? Historically strong coordination between states and corporate elites in Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Japan led to a range of successful planning economic arrangements. Many strategies, as well, can be implemented from China's mixed economy model without espousing a party-state system. Are democracies too democratic for coordinating climate resilience, or can they rise to the occasion of tackling the climate crisis?

Nodes for Socialization

While fully socializing the clean manufacturing and infrastructure apparatus is politically unfeasible, public development of renewable capacity can impose rationality on the clean power transition, helping to clear distributional conflicts. In this article, Melanie Brusseler and Chris Hayes argue for what they term nodal socialization, a framework for allocating public investment—and attendant ownership rights—under macrofinancial constraints.

Coordination in Chaos

The first 100 days of the second Trump administration have indicated that the next months, and perhaps years, will be marked by more uncertainty and increasing political and economic fragmentation. Despite this uncertainty, “green” industrial policies are likely here to stay.

Global BYD

Amid the intensifying retreat of American hegemony, an alternative geo-economic and geopolitical arrangement is coming into view: a battery-powered globalization with Chinese characteristics. Chinese EV manufacturer has recently raced ahead of Tesla in global EV sales. How will China’s EV dominance navigate an increasingly protectionist climate?

Restoring Multilaterism

In the face of increasing protectionism and the threat of tariffs, defenders of the international order have called for a “return to normalcy.” But the emergence of a more hostile international economic environment pre-dates Trump, beginning with the global financial crisis, if not before.