The prospects for developing countries are not what they once were

IN 2000 THIS newspaper wrote that “the most pressing moral, political and economic issue of our time is third-world poverty.” At the time, 28% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, which is to say on incomes of $1.90 a day or less. Nearly one billion of those 1.7bn people lived in India and China.

Just a year later, Jim O’Neill, then the chief economist for Goldman Sachs, a bank, grouped those two countries, along with Brazil and Russia, into one of the defining acronyms of the 2000s: the BRICs. Though at the time the quartet accounted for only 8% of global economic output, Mr O’Neill (now Lord O’Neill) argued that, given their population, even modest growth in their output per person would increase that share significantly, and that such growth looked likely. Investors were urged to take note. So were policymakers.