UNIDO Report Explores BRICS+ Digital Readiness for Manufacturing

By Yaroslav Lissovolik

The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) recently released a report on BRICS+ economies’ digital readiness for manufacturing. The report’s methodology is based on the use of the Digital Readiness Dashboard (DRD) developed by UNIDO and GIZ to assess countries’ readiness for manufacturing digitalization. The analysis covers the 2015–2022 period and is structured around four interrelated capability dimensions: i. enabling infrastructure, ii. production capabilities, iii. innovation capabilities, and iv. digital capabilities. Countries are evaluated against three complementary criteria: i. their performance relative to other BRICS Plus members, ii. their performance relative to global averages for their income group, and iii. positive trends over the 2015–2022 period. The findings of this timely and valuable report identify key areas for coordinated policy action among BRICS+ members – these recommendations may draw attention from India as the 2026 BRICS chair, given the priority accorded to innovation as one of the main pillars of its 2026 BRICS presidency.

The key conclusions of the report include the following:

1. While BRICS Plus countries command strong infrastructure and production capabilities relative to global income-group peers, the conversion of these assets into industrial competitiveness is constrained by innovation gaps and limited advanced digital production (ADP) adoption.

2. Intra-group heterogeneity is significant: the report identifies China and the UAE as leaders in digital capabilities, while in innovation it singles out the Russian Federation and China. At the same time, India stands out as the main beneficiary of growth across all capability dimensions among lower middle-income economies.

3. In order for the 4IR potential to be realized across BRICS Plus members, the report calls for “coordinated national and collective policy action to strengthen innovation ecosystems, expand ADP adoption, close skills gaps, and leverage cooperation platforms to address shared capability”

The report identifies innovation capabilities as the most differentiated and one of the most critical dimensions of digital readiness across the BRICS Plus members. The BRICS+ bloc is deemed as being well-positioned relative to global income-group peers, most notably in advanced and specialized skills. At the same time BRICS+ economies continue to face “a persistent structural challenge in translating research investment and human capital into commercially viable innovation outputs”. Across most innovation indicators the BRICS+ upper middle-income members compare favorably to their peers, placing ahead of the high-income members in terms of research investment and total patents in force, and reducing the gap in advanced skills and research output.

UNIDO notes that one of the areas of concern and risk across several BRICS Plus countries is energy reliability. In particular, BRICS+ members such as South Africa, India, Indonesia, Egypt and Ethiopia report high percentages of firms experiencing electrical outages, with South Africa’s 92% figure being the highest in the BRICS+ group. Such vulnerabilities may negatively affect data-intensive and digitally enabled manufacturing that depend critically on uninterrupted flow of power supply.

The main recommendations of the report with respect to BRICS+ include:

1. Advance 5G and digital infrastructure deployment for smart manufacturing.

2. Strengthen innovation ecosystems through enhanced R&D investment and STEM education.

3. Develop targeted MSME digitalization programs with a manufacturing focus.

4. Leverage the Partnership on the New Industrial Revolution (PartNIR) and intra-bloc cooperation to broaden access to advanced digital production (ADP) technologies and related knowledge exchanges.

5. Build comprehensive and coherent national policy frameworks for digital industrial transformation.

The main focus and recommendations of the UNIDO report align well with the priorities set forth by India for its 2026 BRICS presidency. As has been the case in the past, India tends to accord significant importance to BRICS cooperation that is focused on the micro-level of B2B cooperation across sectors and segments of the economy such as SMEs. In our view, the report rightly singles out 5G and digital infrastructure deployment as key near-term priorities – success in these areas may take the BRICS+ competitiveness in the digital sphere to a higher level. There may be also some consideration given in future research forays by UNIDO on the dissemination of innovation by BRICS+ economies across the broader regions of the Global South, including via employing the entire array of regional integration arrangements and their development institutions. On this note the UNIDO report acknowledges that “the BRICS Plus is increasingly facilitating cooperation among Global South economies on manufacturing and industrial development, making it a strategically significant space for collective action around the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)”.

Yaroslav Lissovolik is a Founder of BRICS+ Analytics.