Emerging Markets

Are CIVET’s the next BRIC’s Economy for Export?

Are CIVETS the new BRICs? At a conference I attended 2 weeks ago one of the key note speakers talked about the CIVETS countries and then struggled to name them. Eventually he said Taiwan instead of Turkey! CIVETS is an acronym for 6 emerging markets with high growth rates, young populations and great potential to be major economies in the future. The list is Colombia, Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa.

Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs coined the term BRICs and then went on to describe the next Eleven. So in some way CIVETS are not totally new as apart from Colombia they are all next eleven countries (South Africa was in the original list for BRICs, but people now tend to just speak about BRIC i.e. Brazil, Russia, India and China)

The acronym CIVETS came from Robert Ward, Director at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in 2009 and was then discussed in a presentation by Michael Geoghegan, CEO of HSBC the following year.

Michael Geoghegan called these countries “the new BRICs”  as they will be the next group of emerging markets and have the potential to grow three times as fast as developed countries.

Economists are always forecasting the next group of high growth and high potential markets that we should be considering. So hot off the press a leading economist at NatWest last week talked about the “Tale of two worlds”, the advanced versus the emerging and developing economies. This year has seen a significant mile stone where for the first time the second group account for just over 50% of world output.

So where next …..BRICs, CIVETS, or the group of countries discussed last week that  combine high growth and attractiveness. China is way out front but then the list is Korea, Mexico, Taiwan, Turkey, and Brazil…not so easy to remember KMTTB, so there should be  a prize for anyone to come up with a country starting with a vowel and turning this list into the next talked about acronym!

Today we hear a lot about Emerging or are they now High Growth Markets. However, we have to go back to 2001 when Jim O’Neil, Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management coined the acronym BRICS in a paper entitled “Building Better Global Economic BRICs”. It was clever and the term stuck with the media always referring to the BRIC economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China that would dominate the world economy in future years. (more…)