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Jim O’Neill gave the world BRIC in 2001 and MINT in 2013. Both were investment classifications, not policy programmes, but from exercises in reading demographic scale, geographic position, and resource endowment as proxies for long-run growth potential.

BRIC became BRICS, then a functioning intergovernmental institution with its own development bank, a $100 billion contingent reserve arrangement, and an expansion that brought its membership to ten nations today.

MINT, twelve years after O’Neill championed it, remains a convenient acronym. No MINT summit has ever been convened.

No MINT foreign ministers’ communiqué has been issued, and no MINT development bank exists.

The comparison is not between two groupings at different stages of the same journey; it is between an institution and a label, and that distinction tells most of what needs to be said about where MINT currently stands.

The structural case for MINT is real. The four economies of Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey were selected against three criteria: large and young populations capable of generating a demographic dividend; geographic positioning at or near a major global trade corridor; and governance trajectories plausible enough to attract foreign capital.

Together, the MINT countries represent approximately 737 million people in 2025, roughly nine per cent of the global population, with a median age profile substantially younger than any of the original BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) economies.

China, which drove more than a quarter of global growth over the past two decades, reached its working-age population peak in 2011 and has been drawing down its demographic dividend ever since.

The MINT countries are still in the early stages, but their strategic position and key assets are shown in Table 1 below.

Table 1: MINT’s Strategic Position and Key Trade Assets 

Source: UN; World Bank; IMF; USMCA Secretariat; AfCFTA 

The scale difference between MINT and BRICS is not a gap; it is a gorge.

The entire economic output of the four MINT countries combined, approximately $5.2 trillion in nominal terms, is smaller than China’s GDP in a single quarter. BRICS economies collectively represent roughly between 35 and 37 per cent of global GDP on purchasing-power-parity terms, a share that grows further after the 2024 expansion.

MINT’s collective weight is significant but not yet structurally transformative at the global level in the way that BRICS has become. Structural potential and realised output are two different things, and the distance between them is where development policy lives.

The most consequential recent development in MINT’s story has come not from within the grouping but from BRICS. In October 2024, thirteen nations, including Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey, were offered BRICS partner status. Indonesia accepted full membership in January 2025, becoming the first Southeast Asian nation in the bloc.

Nigeria accepted partner status the same month. Turkey remains under active negotiation. Only Mexico, anchored in the United States, Mexico, Canada Agreement (USMCA) and unwilling to risk its North American trade relationship, carries no BRICS affiliation.

What this means in practice is that BRICS has recognised, more clearly than most Western analysts, that the MINT economies represent the next tier of strategically significant emerging markets, and has moved deliberately to incorporate them.

MINT, as a standalone concept, is, to a measurable degree, being absorbed into the institution that was supposed to be its counterpart.

The four individual country stories within MINT run at very different speeds.

Mexico presents the strongest structural argument and the most underwhelming recent delivery: in 2024, it became the top source of US imports for the first time in recorded history, with US-Mexico trade reaching $840 billion, yet real GDP growth decelerated to just 1.5 per cent, a figure deeply inconsistent with an economy that the nearshoring thesis predicts should be booming.