Hunt is on for new emerging tigers

Labourers move a concrete mixer past an under-construction site of residential buildings in Kolkata yesterday. Photo: Reuters

For more than 10 years the rise of big emerging markets has re-shaped the global economy but these are now slowing with maturity, and the hunt is on to identify which upstarts will be tomorrow's tigers.
The big five, which recently helped the world through financial crisis but are now experiencing marked growing pains, are Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the BRICS.
On their heels come the MINT, PPICS and CIVETS: acronyms created by economists and investors to describe groups of countries of similar type which could lead the next wave of emerging energy.
Last week more signs of economic tensions became evident in China and Brazil, just as the French trade insurance group Coface produced its list of what it called "neo-emerging" economies: the PPICS.
This creature comprises Peru, the Philippines, Indonesia, Colombia, and Sri Lanka.
All of them have strong growth potential exceeding 4.0 percent, diversified economies, are not unduly dependent on exporting raw materials and have financial systems capable of supporting growth and of absorbing a degree of external shocks.
Coface came up with a second list of countries, making 10 in all, comprising Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Bangladesh and Ethiopia.
These countries also offer growth potential but carry higher intrinsic risks.
Coface said that analysis of which countries, albeit smaller than the big five, could take over as leading emerging economies was needed because the big five were losing their competitive edge and had not yet become competitive in producing high valued-added goods and services.
For nearly a year many emerging markets, and notably the BRICS, have been undermined notably by the winding down of easy-money policies in the United States, which has raised risk and caused large amounts of investment funding to flow out of emerging markets back to advanced economies.
In Russia, a sharp slowing of growth is now being exacerbated by the back-draft of the Ukraine crisis and an outflow of capital.
Brazil has just been downgraded by the Standard & Poor's rating agency.
China is experiencing incidents in its credit system. At the beginning of March there was a payment default on some bonds, and the beginning of a minor run on a small bank, highlighting concerns about obscure parts of the banking system.
The monitoring of the landscape of emerging markets has been underway for many years. In 1988 a barometer called the MSCI Emerging Markets Index was launched to follow 10 countries, and today it tracks 21 economies.