BRICS versus G7: Contesting Economic Weight, Institutional Legitimacy, and Geopolitical Order in a Multipolarising World — A Systematic Literature Review and Analytical Study

Abstract

The post-war international order has long been organised around the institutional and economic primacy of the Group of Seven (G7) — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Since the early 2000s, however, a rival grouping of large emerging economies, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and, from 2024, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates), has grown from a speculative acronym coined inside an investment bank into a functioning bloc with its own summit process, development bank, and payment infrastructure. This paper undertakes a systematic literature review (SLR) combined with an analytical, data-driven comparison of BRICS and the G7 across four dimensions: aggregate economic weight, institutional architecture, trade and financial interdependence, and geopolitical alignment. Using secondary data drawn from the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, Statista-aggregated IMF series, and peer-reviewed and grey literature published mainly before 2024, the study finds that BRICS(+) has overtaken the G7 in purchasing-power-parity (PPP) terms — reaching roughly 32–35 percent of world GDP in 2023–2024 against the G7’s 29–30 percent — while the G7 retains a decisive lead in nominal GDP, per-capita income, financial-market depth, and rule-setting authority within existing multilateral institutions. The paper argues that the BRICS–G7 relationship is better understood as asymmetric institutional competition within a single, interdependent global economy than as a clean bipolar rivalry, and that the bloc’s internal heterogeneity — spanning authoritarian and democratic states, energy exporters and importers, and rival regional powers (China and India) — constrains its capacity to act as a unified pole. The paper concludes with an assessment of what continued BRICS expansion and de-dollarisation efforts mean for global governance reform, and identifies avenues for future comparative research.