'The old rule of forecasting was to make as
many forecasts as possible and publicise the ones you
got right. The new rule is to forecast so far in the
future, no one will know you got it
wrong.' Ruchir Sharma does neither. In
Breakout Nations he shows why the economic
'mania' of the twenty-first century, with its
unshakeable faith in the power of emerging markets -
especially China - to continue growing at the
astoundingly rapid and uniform pace of the last decade,
is wrong. The next economic success stories will not be
where we think they are. In this provocative new
book, Sharma analyses why the basic laws of economic
gravity (such as the law of large numbers, which says
that the richer you are the harder it is to grow your
wealth at a rapid pace) are already pulling China,
Russia, Brazil and other vast emerging markets back to
earth. To understand which nations will thrive and which
will falter in a world reshaped by slower growth, it is
time to start looking at the emerging markets as
individual cases. Sharma argues that we must abandon our
current obsession with global macro trends and the fad
for all-embracing theories. He offers instead a more
discerning, nuanced view, identifying specific factors -
economic, political, social - which will make for slow
or fast growth. Spending much of his professional
life travelling in these countries as Head of Emerging
Markets at Morgan Stanley, Sharma is uniquely placed to
present a first-hand insider's account of these new
markets and the changes they are undergoing. As the
years of unbelievably swift growth draw to their close,
this book shows us how it is time for both investors and
economists to halt their blind thrust towards an
impossible future.
|
|