Breakout Nations

Ruchir Sharma is a head of Emerging Markets and Global Macro at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. He generally spends one week per month in a developing country. He has been a contributing editor with Newsweek and has penned essays for publications such as Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and Economic Times. He is the writer of Best International Economic Book “Breakout Nations.” Recently, I finished reading this book and it is the most interesting book on economic landscape.

The book takes on a life of its own as it delves in depth into each country and its economic drivers. China, India, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Europe, Turkey, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, USA etc all find a mention and an analysis. This book tells the in depth economic conditions of every country. It also covers past crisis of Asia, USA, Europe, and ASEAN countries. This book is also a revelation as well as treasure trove of information and ideas. In this book, Country Specific notions, are challenged and disproved such as in the section of consumer demand in China. Country specific problems that can hold it back are analysed in short and power pack sections like welfare, investments of Indian Businesses abroad in a time when the home country is in urgent need of capital.

It also contains graphs and numerical which tells comparisons and analytic view of each country. Each nation’s problems as well as enablers find adequate mentions giving a nice balance and flow to the analysis, as well depth and convincing power. Economic, political, crimes, as well as other problems find adequate coverage. Some problems like crony capitalism in India, welfare state in Brazil, political situation in Russia, olipolistic nature of Mexico, and rising inflationary trends in India are covered in depth. Each factor that can affects growth are looked at.

The objective of this book is to identify Breakout Nations- the nations most likely to succeed. Both conventional factors and unconventional factors approach in this book is right. For example, the analysis of number of Billionaires in a nation is a revelation. Overall, this book first, teaches one how to properly analyse a market or a nation. Second, it is a handbook of emerging markets. It gives a perspective of entire emerging market in a short.

A word on writing style, it is simple and easy to understand. One does not need to be a professional economist to understand the book. This is perhaps the most powerful plus point of this book. It makes the entire pitch in very simple, easy to understand and comprehend prose. It avoids needless details and voluminous analysis. The analysis is short and up to the point. This makes for a fast read and it makes for easy absorption of the material presented in the book.

As the Breakout Nations identified, be prepared for a surprise. Read the book to learn more, and open your mind to new ideas and thoughts.