The original BRICs thesis was built for 2005. Vietnam, Indonesia, Turkey, and Egypt are the more diversified, more demographically favourable version of the same idea two decades later — and this letter checked the specific growth numbers before publishing them, not after.
The BRICs acronym — Brazil, Russia, India, China — was coined in 2001 to describe the four economies expected to reshape global growth. Twenty-five years on, two of the four (Russia, and increasingly Brazil) have underperformed the original thesis, while a different, more diversified set of economies has emerged as the more convincing structural growth story. This letter names them plainly: Vietnam, Indonesia, Turkey, and Egypt — and treats the exercise of checking the actual growth figures as seriously as the thesis itself.
An earlier version of this research cited Vietnam and Indonesia growing at "446%" and "448%" respectively. We could not locate any primary source supporting those figures and are not publishing them. What we found instead, and can source directly, is more modest and considerably more credible: Indonesia is projected to grow at 3.7% annually through 2050 (PwC / Delphos analysis of World Bank projection data), while Vietnam sits among the fastest-growing large economies globally at approximately 5% annually over the 2015–2050 window, alongside India and Bangladesh. Neither number is as dramatic as "446%." Both are real, and both still support the thesis this letter is making.
"A growth story doesn't need an implausible number to be compelling. It needs a number that survives us actually checking it — and 3.7% compounded for two decades is a genuinely large outcome without needing to be exaggerated into something unbelievable."
The clearest existing academic framing for this letter's thesis is the "E7" — Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, and Turkey — projected by PwC and other analysts to grow at an average 3.5% annually through 2050, against just 1.6% for the G7. On that trajectory, the E7 could hold nearly 50% of global GDP by 2050 while the G7's share falls to just over 20%. Turkey and Indonesia are both already inside this framework; this letter's contribution is adding Vietnam and Egypt as the next tier down, and arguing they deserve equal attention.
Indonesia's population grows from 280 million in 2024 to a projected 317 million by 2050, anchoring Southeast Asia's largest economy with diversified exports — coal briquettes, palm oil, ferroalloys, petroleum gas — totalling roughly $320 billion. As labour costs rise in China, PwC's own 2050 modelling explicitly names Indonesia (alongside Vietnam and Bangladesh) as a primary beneficiary of multinational manufacturing relocation. Some projections place Indonesia as the world's fourth-largest economy by 2050, ahead of several G7 members.
Vietnam is repeatedly singled out across multiple independent projections — Delphos, PwC, and Global Security Review's analysis of World Bank data — as one of the countries making the single greatest jump up the global economic rankings by 2050, alongside the Philippines and Nigeria. That is a different, arguably more interesting claim than simply "high GDP growth": it is a claim about relative repositioning, a smaller economy overtaking a meaningfully larger number of established peers rather than just growing in place.
Turkey is explicitly projected to overtake Italy in the global GDP rankings by 2050 under the same PwC/World Bank-based modelling, part of a broader pattern in which Mexico, Turkey, and Vietnam respectively displace the UK, France, and Italy from positions they have held for generations. Egypt appears in a parallel projection as a country that could overtake Italy and Canada by 2050, and separately is named by Citigroup's "Global Growth Generators" (3G) classification — a list of the most promising growth economies for 2010–2050 that also includes Indonesia, Iraq, and Mongolia.
"The old BRICs thesis was about four countries getting bigger. The next-gen version is about four different countries getting bigger fast enough to displace specific, named G7 economies from rankings they've held for a century."
The original BRICs concentrated risk in two commodity-and-governance-sensitive economies (Russia, Brazil) alongside two genuine demographic giants (India, China). Vietnam, Indonesia, Turkey, and Egypt spread that risk across manufacturing relocation (Vietnam, Indonesia), a genuine bridge economy between Europe and Asia (Turkey), and a Suez-anchored logistics and demographic story (Egypt) — four different growth mechanisms rather than one commodity cycle repeated four times. That structural diversification is the actual argument for treating this as the more modern version of the same idea, not simply a relabelling exercise.
Three things could break this thesis. First, all four countries carry real governance and institutional-continuity risk that the growth projections themselves do not price in — a 2050 projection assumes today's policy trajectory holds for 25 years, which is a long time in emerging-market politics. Second, Turkey specifically carries currency and inflation volatility that has already disrupted its growth story multiple times in the past decade. Third, and most importantly given this letter's own correction above: long-range GDP projections of this kind are genuinely uncertain, sensitive to the specific model and assumptions used, and should be read as directional evidence, not as a forecast with any precision beyond "meaningfully faster than the G7."
Vietnam, Indonesia, Turkey, and Egypt are a genuinely more diversified, better-sourced version of the original BRICs thesis — not because we found a more dramatic number, but because the real numbers (3.5–5% annual growth against the G7's 1.6%, a shrinking G7 share of global GDP, named G7 economies being overtaken in ranking) already make the case without embellishment. We are publishing the growth figures we could verify, and naming directly the ones we couldn't. That is the standard this letter series holds itself to, and this thesis clears it.
Founder, NextGen Economics · Bangalore, India · July 2026
Sources: PwC (The World in 2050) · Delphos (Leading Emerging Markets Set to Overtake G7 Economies by 2050) · Global Security Review (analysis of World Bank projection data) · Citigroup "Global Growth Generators" (3G) classification.
Not investment advice. Long-range GDP projections carry significant uncertainty. All investments carry risk including loss of capital.