Evenhanded, measured, sage advice on the global economy.
This efficient, positive guide for the practical observer and investor shows how to choose healthy emerging markets.
After the 2008 global financial crisis, impermanence is the watchword, writes Sharma (Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles, 2012), the head of emerging markets and global macro at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Since no one seemed to have been able to predict the 2008 meltdown, and the most-hyped emerging nations of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) have now fallen into being considered a “bloody ridiculous investment concept,” the author urges the use of skepticism, short-term planning (five or six years), and reliable data in trying to grasp forces of change. His “rules,” developed over “25 years on the road” with a team of researchers, encompass the factors of growth in some “fifty-six postwar emerging economies that managed to sustain a growth rate of 6 percent for at least a decade.” In each chapter, rather than moving country by country, Sharma tackles one of these factors. He looks at demographic data in order to get a sense of the makeup of the available workforce (falling birthrates are prompting countries to add incentives for having babies, such as in Singapore, France, and Chile, along with increasing the retirement age and attracting migrants), and he considers whether a new political leader will be able to enact reforms (e.g., Brazil’s Lula da Silva), investigates areas of income inequality (e.g., billionaires in India), and examines state spending and how to make the most of a country’s “geographic sweet spot” (e.g., Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam). Sharma discusses investment in factories, the measurement of food prices, and the importance of ignoring the “hype watch” and of keeping an eye on the locals to determine when a country is in crisis or recovery. The final chapter is a rather bold assertion of which countries might be considered “the good, the average, and the ugly.”
Evenhanded, measured, sage advice on the global economy.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24889-0
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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