China's central banker on Friday hailed the BRICS bloc's agreement on establishing its own joint foreign currency reserves pool, calling it "a milestone."

"Such an emergency-orientated joint pool of currency reserves is conducive to promoting global economic growth and global financial stability," Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People's Bank of China, told reporters on the sidelines of the ongoing G20 summit here.

A day earlier, Chinese Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao announced that Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, known as the BRICS countries, had agreed upon a joint foreign currency reserves pool of at least 100 billion US dollars.

Zhou said such a pool would enrich and consolidate intra-BRICS cooperation, enhance trust and shared interests, and strengthen the bloc's capacity to absorb external financial impacts. "The pool constitutes a big step forward in the cooperation mechanism of BRICS."

When asked to elaborate, Zhou added: "The pool also supplements the financial safety net which the international community has been weaving."

"The pool enables emerging economies to break the geographical containment. The pool consists of a significant trial on formulating the financial safety net upon the basis of similar-level development while facing a common global challenge."

Zhou said a pool formed in the midst of an eventful economic situation like now was of special importance.

He further explained the planned pool would learn from other successful regional financial cooperation formats and mechanisms like the Chiang Mai Initiative, and the BRICS pool would become an inter-regional currency cooperation in the form of currency interchanges.

Global Times