The 2020 Work Conference of ITG on Economics, BRICS Network University (BRICS NU) was held online at 8 PM Beijing time on June 10th. Representatives from the 11 member universities of BRICS NU, including the Higher School of Economics, Russia, the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and the University of Campinas, Brazil, attended the meeting. As the coordinator of the Chinese universities of the ITG on Economics, the vice president of BNUBS Cai Hongbo and dean of the Department of Economics Yang Juan attended the meeting. The meeting was host by Alina Shcherbakova from the Higher School of Economics, Russia, which takes over the rotating chair.

Participants mainly discussed the challenges faced by BRICS NU in cooperation under the impact of the epidemic and how to deal with them. As for speeding up the implementation of multilateral cooperation agreement of BRICS NU ITG on Economics, representatives from all countries put forward specific questions and suggestions, and exchanged in-depth information and opinions on international cooperation projects such as student exchange programs, online summer schools and winter camps, and double degree programs. Cai introduced a number of degree cooperation programs of BNUBS and the Double Master Program promoted with the Higher School of Economics, Russia. He also pointed out the obstacles existing in the approval and enrollment of developing double degree programs. Then, Yang suggested that tools such as Dropbox could be used to solve the storage, synchronization and sharing of cross-platform online communication files.

Since the BRICS Universities League (BRICS UL) founded in Beijing Normal University in 2015, and BRICS NU founded in Ural Federal University in 2016, as the coordinator of the Chinese universities of the two organizations, BNUBS has played an active role, not only in attending all the previous annual conferences and work conferences, receiving visitors from Russia, Brazil and other famous universities for many times, but also in hosting the“ Workshop on Sustainable Development for BRICS Trade and Investment Cooperation” in Beijing with International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD of WTO), and inviting the famous scholars from BRICS universities to give lectures, which is widely influential. Under the BRICS cooperation mechanism, a total of 4 teachers of BNUBS have been invited to BRICS universities to offer short-term courses, lectures or teach in summer camps, and 2 students went to the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil for one-year exchange study. In addition, in recent years, the number of applicants for WEC International Master Program from BRICS universities has increased significantly, and the number of students from Russia, Brazil and other countries to exchange learning in BNUBS is stable every year.

（By Office of International Exchange and Cooperation）