Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles
To identify the economic stars of the future we should abandon the habit of extrapolating from the recent past and lumping wildly diverse countries together. We need to remember that sustained economic success is a rare phenomenon.
As an era of easy money and easy growth comes to a close, China in particular will cool down. Other major players including Brazil, Russia, and India face their own daunting challenges and inflated expectations. The new "breakout nations" will probably spring from the margins, even from the shadows. Ruchir Sharma, one of the world's largest investors in emerging markets for Morgan Stanley, here identifies which are most likely to leap ahead and why.
After two decades spent traveling the globe tracking the progress of developing countries, Sharma has produced a book full of surprises: why the overpriced cocktails in Rio are a sign of revival in Detroit; how the threat of the "population bomb" came to be seen as a competitive advantage; how an industrial revolution in Asia is redefining what manufacturing can do for a modern economy; and how the coming shakeout in the big emerging markets could shift the spotlight back to the West, especially American technology and German manufacturing.
What emerges is a clear picture of the shifting balance of global economic power and how it plays out for emerging nations and for the West. In a captivating exploration studded with vignettes, Sharma reveals his rules on how to spot economic success stories. Breakout Nations is a rollicking education for anyone looking to understand where the future will happen.
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It is really the focus of economic attention around the world. It is a whole new look at which economies are going to be winners and which are going to be losers.--Prannoy Roy, NDTV
Mr. Sharma's intent is to help you find the best places around the world to invest, emphasizing that it will take some work on your part.
At the core of this impressive book is the counter-intuitive argument that the boom of the mid-2000s was a blip in the long historical trend for emerging economies and that the next decade may be one of decelerating. In Sharma's view, the much-hyped decline of the West and emergence of the rest may take a lot longer than optimists would like to believe.
There is no better book for country-by-country accounts of emerging markets (and riskier ones called frontier markets). Its strong point is the author's reliance on grassroots experience in each country, avoiding statistical charts.
Breakout Nations works best as a compilation of highly illuminating country vignettes--similar, say, to Michael Lewis' Boomerang... As with Mr. Lewis' work on the European crisis, for sheer readability and insight on the various parts of the ongoing developing world drama, I dare say you won't find a better choice.--Jonathan Anderson
Breakout Nations is basically an investors lonely planet guide to the world for the new century.
