Put a jaguar, a bear, a tiger and a panda together and you might get a good show but you won't get a quiet life.

The Bric grouping – Brazil, Russia, India and China – has become a shorthand for the rise of emerging markets in the global economy. And after a rather stellar decade, the Brics mainly had a good crisis from which they are now rapidly exiting.

Goldman Sachs, the financial group that invented the category, reckons that China may well become the world's largest economy outright before 2030. Collectively, the Bric economies could well surpass output in the Group of Seven wealthy nations – which have dominated the management of the global economy – by 2032.

The Brics already have a bigger share of world trade than the US. China, probably the world's biggest goods exporter last year, has been supplemented by India's software and back-office exports, Russia's oil and gas and the domination of a number of agricultural commodity markets by Brazil's super-competitive farmers.

While equities in G7 countries were struggling to stay in positive territory during the past five or so years, the Bric share prices, albeit with a steep drop and rapid recovery during the global financial crisis, finished the decade more than twice as high as in 2005. Bric equity indices have emerged; Bric funds have sprung up for investors to pile into the sector.

So as the world emerges from recession, is this a transformational moment when the centre of gravity in the global economy and its governance decisively shifts? Is this a pivot point such as the second world war, where the confident, innovative US muscled aside the weakened, debt-laden economies of Europe and remade the global financial architecture? And, most immediately, are Bric consumers currently up to the task of rebalancing the world economy by supplanting their acquisitive American counterparts?

The most likely answer is: not yet. Not only are the Brics such a disparate group that almost any generalisation is problematic, but China, the overwhelmingly dominant member of the quartet, still seems wedded to an economic model dependent on demand elsewhere.

“The so-called emerging economies, even some like Bangladesh, are undoubtedly players on the global stage,” said Jean-Pierre Lehmann, professor of political economy at the IMD management school in Lausanne, Switzerland. “But I don't see any great cataclysm in the next 10 years, nor the centre of finance definitively moving east.”

Like a boy band or a street gang, the Brics might almost have been chosen for their disparate abilities rather than their similarities. China's size and openness to trade give it as much economic clout as the rest put together: Markus Jäger, of Deutsche Bank, calls the hypercompetitive manufacturing exporter “the 800lb panda in the room”. India, similar in population but poorer and economically more insular, is chiefly notable to investors and trading partners for its software and business services. Brazil, despite a sprinkling of successful manufacturers, remains one of the world's most efficient agro-exporters; Russia, after feebler attempts to diversify, essentially just sells oil and gas.

The story of their rapid progress is familiar but still dramatic. A decade ago, only one had an investment-grade credit rating; now all do. Only 12 years ago, a Russian debt default and Brazilian currency crisis rocked the world economy; today, they have accumulated vast foreign exchange reserves.