LAGOS – (Reuters) – The large, fast-growing emerging market countries dubbed the BRICs and MINTs are still likely to be the most promising investment destinations over the next decade, despite emerging market turbulence, Jim O’Neill, who coined the terms, said.
Former Goldman Sachs economist O’Neill came up with the name BRIC in 2001 to group Brazil, Russia, India and China as countries whose growth will shape the world economy in the coming decades.
This year, in a series on BBC radio, he championed the MINT group of countries, similarly blessed with fast economic growth and large, young populations – Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey – as the next economic giants after the BRICs.
“The BRIC and the MINT countries, if I’m right, over the next decade will … shape the world economy’s development,” O’Neill told Reuters on Tuesday on the sidelines of an Africa Finance Corporation conference in Nigeria’s commercial hub of Lagos. “And if that’s the case, they will be the most successful places in terms of investments too.”
O’Neill’s coining of the BRIC acronym spurred a rash of funds focusing on these countries – a consequence he told Reuters he never intended – but anxiety about emerging markets has triggered a pullback over the past year.
BRIC funds held 9 billion euros at the end of last year, from 21 billion euros at end 2010.
This has been largely driven by the U.S. Federal Reserve’s tapering of its bond-buying programme, which exposed how vulnerable frontier and emerging markets can be to hot money.
It also has begun to dawn on investors that economic growth does not always mean higher stock market returns, which can be hindered by corporate governance problems or dodgy accounting.
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