06 December 2011

The Growth Map ~ O'Neill Goes Beyond BRICs!

The Telegraph has been publishing excerpts of Goldman economist Jim O'Neill's new book, The Growth Map...
"My only regret on the first BRICs analysis of 2001 is that we weren't bolder. Between 2001 and 2010, the BRIC economies' GDP rose much more sharply than I had thought possible even in the most optimistic scenario. [...] In all my analysis of world economies, amid all the information and hype, I have stayed focused on the benefits of an expanding, more productive workforce. [...] I had not fully appreciated the simple but critical importance of demographics and productivity. Simply applying the most credible estimates of long-term demographic trends, especially for the working population, is the intellectual cornerstone of the argument for the BRICs' potential. Between them, the four BRIC countries are home to close on 3 billion people, not far off half the world's population. [...] Given the BRICs' success, it should be no surprise that many other countries are now vying to be dubbed the next BRIC. [...] We came up with a group that we called the 'Next Eleven', or N-11 for short. They are Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, (South) Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam. Although we thought no N-11 country was likely to grow to the size of any of the BRICs, we predicted that Mexico and Korea had the capacity to become almost as important as the BRICs. [...] the term emerging markets could no longer be applied to the BRICs and four of the N-11: Indonesia, Korea, Mexico and Turkey. These are now countries with largely sound government debt and deficit positions, robust trading networks and huge numbers of people all moving steadily up the economic ladder. For investors to understand the scale of the opportunity here, and for policymakers to grasp what is changing in the world, they must see these countries apart from the traditional emerging markets. I decided that a more accurate term would be Growth Markets."

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