THE FOREIGN POLICY INSTITUTE

The rise of emerging and growth markets over the past decade, the rapid growth of a global middle class and the demographic domination of Asia portends a dramatically transformed world that requires visionary policy thinking within a global context. The Global Emerging and Growth Markets Initiative (GEGMI) examines the implications of this most significant geo-economic development of our time.

 

Only a generation ago, emerging and growth markets accounted for 15% of GDP. Today, they account for nearly half.  Meanwhile, intra-emerging markets – or so-called South-South trade – now account for 25% of all world trade, and rising. Meanwhile, the largest emerging and growth markets multinational companies are competing globally, while major Western multinational companies see their future growth in the buying power of the emerging world’s growing middle class. Private equity firms are setting their sights on the new frontiers of growth markets, and new entrepreneurs are emerging from Chile to China, Morocco to Malaysia.  The geo-economic and geo-commercial tectonic plates are shifting.

 

From the CHIMEA corridor (China, India, Middle East, Africa), to what HSBC has called “the Southern Silk Road” of intra-emerging markets trade, from the disruptive effects of the US shale revolution on world energy markets to how the ailments of Europe are affecting North Africa, from China’s footprint in Latin America and Africa to the growing might of emerging market multinational companies worldwide to the rise of new hub cities and new trade networks, GEGMI will capture the multiple linkages in our new global economy and present a diverse range of voices from the private sector, academia, finance, multi-lateral development banks, and civil society.

 

Led by Afshin Molavi (Johns Hopkins SAIS M.A, ‘97), who co-founded the World Economy Roundtable at The New America Foundation, has advised Fortune 100 companies on emerging markets strategies, serves as a senior advisor at Oxford Analytica, and written and spoken widely on emerging and growth markets, particularly “The New Silk Road,” the rise of Dubai as a geo-commercial hub, global multinational consumer companies and the emerging middle class, China’s economic footprint in the Middle East, the  power and global reach of the new emerging market multinationals, and the geopolitics of energy, GEGMI will serve as a nexus point for academics and specialists, private sector practitioners and investors, and policy-makers and multilateral development bank leaders. It will also serve as a critical E-to-E platform of Emerging-Emerging conversations.