In June 2003, the foreign ministers of India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) met in Brasilia to discuss forging closer ties between their nations. It was at this meeting that the India-Brazil-South Africa Dialogue Forum (IBSA Forum) was formally launched in order to foster closer engagement between the IBSA countries and to facilitate collaboration in multilateral governance fora and the development of common positions on a number of important issues.

A decade on from the establishment of the IBSA Forum, the general view is that these and other initiatives have had a ‘profoundly beneficial effect’ in terms of ‘improving trade among the three nations’ and that ‘intra-IBSA trade has grown significantly’. This brief seeks to test these claims by examining data on intra-IBSA trade flows to assess the performance of intra-IBSA trade over the past decade. In addition, the brief also takes a cursory look at the composition of intra-IBSA trade.

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