Breakout Nations

Reading Breakout Nations, by Ruchir Sharma.

It concerns the author's review of various emerging market nations to assess which have the best chance of breaking out economically.

Some interesting points include:

• He considers India as only having 50/50 chance of breaking out.
• He is high on Poland and South Korea.
• He is interestingly high on Turkey, particularly because wages are still quite low there.  But it will be interesting whether he writes about it more negatively in his Epilogue (I'm only halfway through the book) in light of recent issues there, including the failed coup, the terrorism issues, the chaos of the war next door and Turkey's intervention etc.
• He argues that wealth accumulation in the hands of a few individuals suggests economic stagnation--he provides a table which shows that Malaysia has very concentrated wealth (not surprising).
• He is down on Hungary. Down on Mexico. Down on Russia.
• Interestingly, he draws a divide between whether a country will be a breakout nation and whether its stock market will do well, arguing that a country can have a good stock market, without being a breakout nation.
• Overall, he argues that, emerging market nations as a whole, will not rise and fall together, like they once did.  So picking winners will be important going forward.