Читать книгу The Emerging Markets Handbook - Pran Tiku - Страница 38

Economic and fiscal conditions are the building blocks of any economy. While it is useful to evaluate economic conditions based on top-line GDP numbers, there are other ways to evaluate a nation’s economic conditions, including debt rates, savings rates, inflation and overall competitiveness. Criteria such as these help one determine whether a nation’s growth is sustainable, whether the growth is driven by exports or by internal consumption, and how well the economy is responding to changes.

Many emerging market economies are currently transitioning away from high growth rates based on the export of goods and services (on the backs of cheap labour) to a more balanced rate of growth based on innovation and internal demand. China, Brazil and Indonesia are likely to be great illustrations of such a transition.

In the past, emerging markets have – almost without exception – experienced untold misery because of extremely high inflation rates. For nations with higher than normal savings rates (again, true for almost all emerging market nations) this robs savers of their purchasing power and causes great stress for the aspiring middle class. Today, we see these nations adopting policies to prevent such occurrences from happening, along with a focus on managing deficits and curtailing subsidies.

Despite some challenges, emerging markets have shown they can produce 3% to 4% higher growth rates than developed markets and there is a high likelihood that these advantages can be sustained.