The Growth Map
by Jim O'Neill
Portfolio Penguin
Jim O'Neill is one of the world's most quoted economic advisers. It was he who in 2001 coined the acronym 'BRIC' to describe the world's four fastest-growing countries and predicted that they would overtake the six largest Western economies within 40 years.
BRIC - Brazil, Russia, India and China - has become part of the English language; their success over the past decade has surpassed his most ambitious forecasts. (In 2010, South Africa was added, changing the acronym to BRICS.) This has changed the way we see the world and has made O'Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, a sought-after investment adviser and conference speaker.
This book, subtitled Economic Opportunity in the BRICs and Beyond, gives his analysis of the economies of the original four over the past decade and points us to the countries that will follow them.
The new acronym is 'Next Eleven' or N-11 - Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam.
'In early 2011 I decided that the term 'emerging markets' could no longer be applied to the BRICs or four of the N-11 - Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico and Turkey. 'Growth Markets' would be more accurate,' O'Neill writes. 'They have the right demographics and productivity momentum to grow faster than the world average. They have superior growth environments to most emerging markets and the financial infrastructure, market size and depth required by international investors. They offer plenty of different, liquid investment opportunities.'