Must-Read: Bill Emmott: The Great Emerging-Market Bubble

Must-Read: Bill Emmott: The Great Emerging-Market Bubble: “if convergence and outperformance were merely a matter of logic and destiny…

…that logic ought also to have applied during the decades before developing-country growth started to catch the eye. But it didn’t…. The main determinants of an emerging-economy’s ability actually to emerge, sustainably, are politics, policy and all that is meant by the institutions of governance…. Countries can ride waves of growth and exploit commodity cycles despite having dysfunctional political institutions, [but] the real test comes when… a country needs to change course. That is what Brazil has been finding so difficult…. Since 2010, got stuck not because of bad luck, or any loss of entrepreneurial spirit in its private sector, but because of… Brazil’s government… unwilling or unable to cut back its bloated public sector, has been mired in vast corruption scandals, and yet… Dilma Rousseff continues to evince a fondness for just the sort of state-led capitalism that leads to exactly these problems. The democracies of Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, and South Africa are all currently failing to… mediate smoothly between competing interest groups and power blocs in order to permit a broader public interest to prevail… so that resources move from uses that have become unprofitable to ones that have a higher potential…

August 18, 2015

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