The term 'emerging markets' gives no joy. Retire it, heeding Dani Rodrik
Economist Dani Rodrik has put out a tweet that's likely to get some traction. He says his wish for the new year is for the term 'emerging markets' to be retired. We agree.
The term ‘emerging markets’ reduces a large part of the world to potential investment targets of globalized finance, draining them of their complexity and internal challenges, as Rodrik said. While it has some utility for those in charge of large pools of savings in the rich world, such as pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, seeking to allocate capital across the world in different financial instruments, it abstracts away country-specificities. Political differences and differences in macroeconomic conditions and economic structure are all set aside when economies are viewed through the asset allocation prism.
Single-party-ruled, authoritarian China, which is the world’s largest bilateral creditor to developing countries, is clubbed with India, with its competitive democracy and perpetual need to import global savings. Today’s categorization of countries as advanced, the emerging and the rest shares a lineage with Eurocentricism and Orientalism. Take ‘Discovery of America’.
This is strictly from the point of view of European contemporaries of Christopher Columbus. For the Aztecs, Incas and the plains tribes that inhabited the Americas and had built fairly complex civilisations, complete with urbanism and the mathematics and astronomy needed to produce accurate calendars, there was no question of America having to be discovered. They were descendants of pre-historic humans, who had migrated across the land bridge today submerged by the Bering Straits separating Alaska from the eastern tip of Siberia, during the last ice age, when the seas had been
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