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
| Country | Strategic Position | Key Asset (2024–25) |
| Mexico | Borders USA; USMCA member | $840B US-Mexico trade; nearshoring hub |
| Indonesia | Controls the Strait of Malacca | Approx. 40% of global maritime trade; 25% world nickel |
| Nigeria | West African gateway | Africa’s #1 oil producer and natural gas reserves; AfCFTA anchor |
| Turkey | Bosphorus chokepoint; NATO member | EU Customs Union; energy transit hub |
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.
The fiscal deficit reached a 35-year high of approximately five per cent of GDP, and approximately 80 per cent of record FDI represented reinvestment of earnings by companies already present rather than new capital. The opportunity is real, but the political management of it has been uncertain.
Indonesia is the most consistent emerging market story anywhere in the world. For more than a decade, through the taper tantrum, the pandemic, and the 2023/2024 global interest rate shock, it has delivered approximately five per cent GDP growth with a reliability that few economies at any income level match.
Its control of the Strait of Malacca, through which roughly 40 per cent of global maritime trade passes, gives it structural leverage that cannot be replicated by policy.
Its approximately 25 per cent share of global nickel reserves, a material central to electric vehicle battery production, has been deliberately monetised through downstream processing requirements that compel foreign manufacturers to invest in Indonesian industry rather than simply extract the raw mineral.
Nigeria is the group’s greatest wildcard with its extraordinary demographic arithmetic of about 230 million people, a median age of 18, 63 per cent of the population under 25, and a working-age cohort that will be among the world’s largest by 2050.
The Tinubu administration’s reforms since May 2023 of petrol subsidy removal, FX market unification, and fiscal consolidation are structurally the right decisions and have produced early results: foreign reserves recovered to approximately $49.52 billion by March 2026, and the Naira (Nigeria’s domestic currency) has stabilised.
The near-term costs have been severe, with headline inflation peaking above 34 per cent (before rebasing to 2024 prices brought it down to 15.06% in February 2026) and poverty touching roughly 62 per cent of the population.
Whether the reform programme holds through the political cycle will determine which end of a very wide growth range Nigeria occupies by 2035.
Turkey is the most intellectually complex country in the group. Its geography is exceptional, controlling the Bosphorus, which is a vital, 31-kilometre natural strait in Istanbul, Turkey, that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, a NATO member, holder of EU customs union access and its GDP per capita on purchasing-power-parity terms already exceeds $43,500, making it substantially wealthier than the other three MINT members. It also demonstrated, more visibly than any of them, that structural advantages do not insulate an economy from self-inflicted damage.
Consumer inflation reached 85.4 per cent in October 2022 after years of unorthodox monetary policy.
The correction is now underway: the policy rate has come down from a peak of 50 per cent to 37 per cent by January 2026, and a Turkish economy with inflation at 15 per cent and a stable lira (Turkish domestic currency), which is the IMF’s 2027 projection, would look dramatically different to international investors than the economy of 2022 – 2024.
Table 2: MINT GDP Outlook and Projections (Nominal USD)
| Country | 2025 Est. | 2030 Projected | 2035 Projected | Key Growth Driver |
| Mexico | $1.85T | $2.2 – $2.5T | $2.8 – $3.2T | Nearshoring; USMCA trade flows |
| Indonesia | $1.44T | $1.8 – $2.0T | $2.3 – $2.8T | Stable 5% growth; nickel EV supply chain |
| Turkey | $1.52T | $2.0 – $2.3T | $2.6 – $3.2T | Post-disinflation rebound; EU nearshoring |
| Nigeria (2025) | $0.38T | $0.38 – $0.45T | $0.6 – $0.9T | Demographic dividend; reform momentum |
| MINT Total | Approx. $5.3T | Approx. $6.4 -$7.2T | Approx. $8.3 -$10.1T | Combined trajectory |
Sources: IMF World Economic Outlook 2025; author’s scenario modelling
As depicted in Table 2, on current trajectories, the four MINT economies will grow from approximately $5.3 trillion in collective output today to between $8.3 and $10.1 trillion by 2035.
Indonesia and Mexico will drive the bulk of that expansion; Nigeria carries the widest uncertainty band in the group, reflecting the distance between what sustained reform would deliver and what structural inertia would not.
The decade ahead will test whether MINT’s structural advantages of demographics that no BRICS member can now replicate, geographic chokepoints of rising strategic value, and resource endowments that the energy transition makes newly critical translate into the institutional and governance quality that converts potential into output.
The BRICS playbook offers MINT one unambiguous lesson.
BRICS went from a Goldman Sachs research paper to a functioning intergovernmental institution in eight years, which gave it the gravitational pull to expand to ten members and begin reshaping multilateral financial architecture. MINT has been a functioning acronym for twelve years and has produced nothing equivalent.
Demographics, geography, and resources are structural advantages, not self-executing ones. The first step in translating an economic thesis into economic reality, as the BRICS experience demonstrated, is deciding that you mean it.
Akinola Morakinyo (Ph. D) writes on MINT economies from the Department of Economics, Finance & Quantitative Analysis, University of Kennesaw, GA, USA
