BRASILIA — The BRICS bloc of emerging economies on Friday reaffirmed its commitment to promoting competition and combating monopolies.

The five BRICS members of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, gathering here for their 5th International Competition Conference, issued a joint declaration, pledging continued efforts to implement policies and practices that encourage competitiveness.

Organized by Brazil's Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE), the event gathered officials and experts from BRICS and other countries.

"In addition to discussions of an academic nature and topics of interest to policies for competition, we had concrete proposals that will help cooperation over the coming years," CADE President Alexandre Barreto told Xinhua.

"We will have an exchange of information that will help the respective authorities in (the area of) competition, in their daily work, which will be reflected in better services in their respective countries and for their people," said Barreto.

"Competition is fundamental to increasing productivity, adopting new processes, to innovation. Adopting new processes reduces costs and makes management efficient. The driver behind all of this is competition," said Brazil's Finance Minister Henrique Meirelles, who joined the conference Thursday evening.

Delegates from more than 25 countries attended this year's conference, said Barreto, including academics from 26 universities, and representatives from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Previous conferences were held in Russia in 2009, China in 2011, India in 2013 and South Africa in 2015.