Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- I spent last week in Indonesia,
working on a series for BBC Radio about four of the world’s most
populous non-BRIC emerging economies. The BRIC countries --
Brazil, Russia, India and China -- are already closely watched.
The group I’m studying for this project -- let’s call them the
MINT economies -- deserve no less attention. Mexico, Indonesia,
Nigeria and Turkey all have very favorable demographics for at
least the next 20 years, and their economic prospects are
interesting.
Policy makers and thinkers in the MINT countries have often
asked me why I left them out of that first classification.
Indonesians made the point with particular force. Over the years
I’ve become accustomed to being told that the BRIC countries
should have been the BRIICs all along, or maybe even the BIICs.
Wasn’t Indonesia’s economic potential more compelling than
Russia’s? Despite the size of its relatively young population (a
tremendous asset), I thought it unlikely that Indonesia would do
enough on the economic-policy front to quickly realize that
potential.
