In his newly published book, The Emerging Markets Century, Antoine Van Agtmael says that, by 2030, emerging market companies will overtake industrialized country firms. Among the book's many strengths, says a New York Times review is his discussion of the current boom in south-south investments, and his selection of the 25 top-performing emerging market companies today.
This blog post is not an attempt to plug his book -- the NYT took care of that. This is to claim some "guilt by association". While working at IFC as an investment officer in the late 1970s, Antoine van Agtmael coined the term “emerging markets” as a way of encouraging equity investors to think more seriously about the developing nations.
For more on how the term "emerging markets" was born, click here.
Incidentally, the title of the review, and therefore the title of this entry, appears to be a misquote, as the book uses the phrase "nearly 1 in 10" Fortune 500 companies are from emerging market economies. This rough figure is not cited in the book, but appears to be based on UNCTAD's 2006 World Investment Report analysis that 47 such firms come from developing and transition economies (p. xxiv).
Posted by: Matthew Quint | June 05, 2007 at 05:05 PM