Think tanks of five member--Brazil, Russia, India, China andSouth Africa- BRICS bloc, representing the emerging economies, reachedconsensus on creating a BRICS development bank to complement existing globalfinancial institutions like World Bank.
Liu Youfa, deputy director of the China Institute ofInternational Studies, said, "At the previous forum before the BRICSsummit meeting in March, we were still discussing whether to create this bank,but now we are talking about how to create this bank.
"The consensus was reached between experts from thethink tanks from five emerging world economic powers during the two two-dayforum held this week at Chongqing city in China," Chinese state run Xinhuanews agency reported on Tuesday.
The 2012 BRICS Think-Tanks Forum is a follow up to theunderstanding reached at the BRICS leaders summit in New Delhi in March thisyear to consider the possibility of creating a new development bank.
It was decided at the summit to convene expert meetings toexplore the possibility.
Being the first think-tank forum of its kind, briefed toadvise governments of each BRICS country, experts at the event said that theiragreement on the necessity and practicality of creating the bank would bepresented to officials for further action.
H H S Viswanathan, a fellow of India's Observer ResearchFoundation, who took part in the meeting, said no report was worked out at themeeting.
But, he said, discussion will surely be included in thereport of the next forum, set to take place in South Africa before the nextBRICS summit to be held there in 2013.
India expects to see the bank established as soon aspossible, he was quoted by Xinhua as saying.
Although no timetable was set, a road map has become clearafter this week's forum and all five sides are clear what to do next that is tofigure out the form of organisation for the bank, equity shares, head officeand other issues, he said.
Liu Youfa said think tanks are a preliminary step ingovernment policy-making and the influence of their ideas in part depends ontheir feasibility and thoroughness.
According to Liu, the consensus reached at the forumincluded the need to build a legal framework, establishment of a theoreticalframework and the discussion on technical issues.
The first of the concerns was defining the legal status ofthe bank, the second was to explain its purpose, and the third was about howthe bank should be run, its capitalisation and other specific matters, he said.
Leonid Grigoriev, deputy director of the Russian EnergyAgency and professor of the Higher School of Economics, said, "Wegenerally agreed to create this bank.
"We scanned all the related issues to be furtherdiscussed and formed our opinions on them including issues such as the mode,the capitalisation, the purpose of the bank", he said.