World Monitor Magazine June #3 | Page 127

additional content needed for transportation, communications, and energy, and the financial infrastructure needed to channel investment and savings. As these platforms develop, they provide resources essential for national growth and reduce the market inefficiencies that slow the pace of development. Africa as they advance to the next stage. These are regions where growth is rapidly shifting — and in some countries has already shifted — from industrialization to technology-fueled transformation. For that reason, we’ve stopped calling them emerging markets; the term growth markets is a better descriptor. In an established industrial community, these three domains have grown up over time, and it is easy to take them for granted. But in an emerging economy, they must be designed and developed in unison. Hard infrastructure, such as roads, must be matched by softer infrastructure, such as good hospitals and schools. Dependable power supplies and communication networks must be in place before manufacturers can set up efficient production facilities and distribution networks. Companies must be able to attract skilled labor with more than just jobs. They must offer an environment conducive not only to economic success but to good living as well. Investing in these markets is a very different game from going into an industrializing market in search of double-digit GDP growth or cheap labor. But thousands of opportunities beckon for all sorts of forward-looking companies, big and small, established and entrepreneurial, domestic and foreign. In emerging markets, companies must offer an environment conducive not only to economic success but to good living as well The need for such development opens up any number of opportunities for business leaders, both foreign and domestic, to invest in the economies of Asia, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Many global companies and investors have been discouraged from going into these markets over the past decade as overall GDP growth has slowed and emerging market equities have trailed those of developed countries. But withdrawal and retreat is a shortsighted strategy. It is shortsighted in part because growth economies are still expanding much faster than those of the developed world; they will account for almost two-thirds of global GDP growth by 2021. We expect, on the basis of trade, investment, and GDP growth data from the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook, to see the next major growth surge begin in the year ahead, and to return to the global economic heights experienced in 2011–12. Absolute gains in GDP — the actual growth in value — should reach 1.9 times that expected in d