YEKATERINBURG, Russia — Leaders of the four largest emerging market economies discussed ways to reduce their reliance on the United States at their first formal summit meeting on Tuesday. But they concluded with only a cautious statement suggesting a move away from the dollar’s role in global commerce and a call for greater representation of developing countries in global financial institutions.
By some predictions, the four nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China, a group referred to as the BRIC group, will surpass the current leading economies by the middle of this century, a tectonic shift that by this reckoning will eventually nudge the United States and Western Europe away from the center of world productivity and power.
Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said the main point of the meeting was to show that “the BRIC should create conditions for a more just world order.”
The four countries produce about 15 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and hold about 40 percent of the gold and hard currency reserves, but they are not a unified bloc and do not do enough business among themselves to justify a trade alliance.
Russia and Brazil export natural resources, China exports manufactured goods and India bases its growth primarily on domestic demand. As such, India is not as concerned with the status of the dollar and is by no means as intent on scoring ideological points against the United States as is Russia.
The acronym BRIC was coined by a Goldman Sachs economist in 2001 to describe the four countries that were expected to surpass today’s largest economies by 2050, owing to their faster growth rate.
A communiqué issued after the meeting highlighted the common goals of a “greater voice” in international financial institutions and a “more diversified” global monetary system. They agreed to meet again in 2010, in Brazil.
The gathering was the second of back-to-back summit meetings sponsored by Russia in this city in the Ural Mountains on the divide between Europe and Asia.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional security alliance intended loosely as a counterweight to NATO, met in an expanded format with many Eurasian nations holding observer status. It even included a brief appearance by the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose disputed re-election last week has touched off street demonstrations in Tehran.
In a sign of regional economic integration, China’s president, Hu Jintao, pledged $10 billion in aid to Central Asian nations in the group, which consists of China, Russia and four former Soviet states: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Mr. Hu and Mr. Medvedev then met separately with India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Mr. Medvedev encouraged China, the world’s largest holder of dollar reserves, and other nations to put their money in some other currency or financial mechanism. He also urged members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to use their national currencies in conducting bilateral trade.
“There can be no successful currency system, and particularly a global system, if the financial instruments that are used are denominated in only one currency,” Mr. Medvedev said. “Today, this is the case and the currency is the dollar.”
A top economic policy aide to Mr. Medvedev, Arkady Dvorkovich, said Russia would like to diversify its currency reserves away from dollars by buying bonds from Brazil, China and India, but only if they bought Russian rubles as a reserve.
The dollar fell slightly against the euro and other currencies on Tuesday, though some traders quoted by Bloomberg News cited a more workaday cause: good results on new American housing starts were encouraging investors to move out of Treasury bonds and into equities.
