Category Archives: economic development

Will Emerging Markets Fall in 2012?

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Emerging markets have performed amazingly well over the last seven years. They have outperformed the advanced industrialized countries in terms of economic growth, debt-to-GDP ratios, and countercyclical fiscal policy.  Many now receive better assessments by rating agencies and financial markets than some of the advanced economies.

As 2012 begins, however, emerging markets may be due for a correction, triggered by a new wave of “risk off” behavior among investors. Will China experience a hard landing? Will a decline in commodity prices hit Latin America? Will the sovereign-debt woes of the European periphery spread to neighbors such as Turkey in a new “Aegean crisis”? read more

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Escaping the Oil Curse

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Libyans have a new lease on life, a feeling that, at long last, they are the masters of their own fate. Perhaps Iraqis, after a decade of warfare, feel the same way. Both countries are oil producers, and there is widespread expectation among their citizens that that wealth will be a big advantage in rebuilding their societies.

Meanwhile, in Africa, Ghana has begun pumping oil for the first time, and Uganda is about to do so as well. Indeed, from West Africa to Mongolia, countries are experiencing windfalls from new sources of oil and mineral wealth. Adding to the euphoria are the historic highs that oil and mineral prices have reached on world markets over the last four years. read more

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The Phylloxera Analogy: Lessons from Emerging Markets

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      In 2008, the global financial system was grievously infected by so-called toxic assets originating in the United States.  As a result of the crisis, many have asked what fundamental rethinking will be necessary to save macroeconomic theory.  Some answers may lie with models that have in the past been applied to fit the realities of emerging markets — models that are at home with the financial market imperfections that have now unexpectedly turned up in industrialized countries.  The imperfections include default risk, asymmetric information, incentive incompatibility, procyclicality of capital flows, procyclicality of fiscal policy, imperfect property rights, and other flawed institutions.   To be sure, many of these theories had been first constructed in the context of industrialized economies, but they had not become mainstream there.   Only in the context of less advanced economies were the imperfections undeniable.  There the models thrived.     
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