Innholdsfortegnelse for SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2024 i World Economic Journal

BRICS 250: Merging financial success with sustainable growth in emerging markets BRICS 250 METHODOLOGY In a world where sustainable development is increasingly prioritised, the establishment of the BRICS 250 ranking is a contribution to global cooperation and progress, with experts from various countries evaluating and ranking the largest companies from BRICS nations. The analysis and evaluation of companies are primarily based on their financial and ESG reports. Additionally, only the most reliable data sources have been utilised, including government databases and authoritative international ratings and indices. The set of evaluation criteria includes market capitalisation, revenue and corporate strategy, as well as the implementation of ESG activities. Particular emphasis is placed on the company's use of renewable energy, waste management practices, 'green' investments and inclusive corporate policies. This ranking, in itself,…

In the pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), urban innovation plays a pivotal role in shaping resilient and sustainable cities. This catalogue showcases some of the newest advances—from a street-cleaning robot and a water-from-air device to a public safety drone and a dry waste sorting machine—aimed at enhancing citizens’ lives, health and safety. Manufactured across various countries—including China, India, Russia, Türkiye, the USA and more—each product embodies a unique approach to solving urban issues. Exploring these diverse and remarkable solutions provides a glimpse into the future that forward-thinking cities are crafting for their residents. 1 UV-C sterilisation robot Supplier Akin Robotics Konya, Türkiye akinrobotics.com SDGs • Good Health and Well-Being Problem Health risks in public places Solution The UV-C sterilisation robots offer reliable and precise disinfection in enclosed…

Mohamed al-Afdal i s an Egyptian journalist who reports on policy, economic, and environmental issues. His works appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Quartz and Grid. In 2011, during the January 25 Revolution, “bread” was one major rallying cry for the millions of protesters who took to Egypt’s streets demanding change. Bread signified decades of Egypt’s economic struggles, culminating in poverty that afflicted nearly a third of the population while youth unemployment was around 35%. Since then, in spite of a moment of stability between 2017 and 2021, Egypt’s economic and social misfortunes have not receded. EXTERNAL WOES The country’s challenges were severely exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the international supply chain disruptions that occurred in 2022, and a severe dollar shortage that same year with billions of dollars fleeing…

Saad Hasan is Principal at Sturgeon Capital. He has a decade of experience in both emerging and developed markets. From 2017 to 2019, he co-founded and scaled Jrop, a North-American Mapping-as-a-Service company. His career includes roles at HBL, Pakistan’s largest bank, Morgan Stanley, Qatar Airways and JLL. It is the first thing on everyone’s Pakistan presentation—its 250-million population. Who wouldn’t be impressed by such a large number of potential customers? While size does matter, this number alone does not tell the whole story. To identify the correct business models and strategies to pursue, it is important to understand the breakdown of the 37 million households and incomes within that population. • GROUP 1 – Nearly one third (32%) of households is below the poverty line with a household income under…

A multi awarded serial entrepreneur and investor, Abbas Kazmi started his first company at the age of 16. Ex-BlackRock, he is the co-founder of the Oxford Accelerator, Collegiate Capital, BlackWood Ventures, and now the SABAH.fund. An advisor to several governments in the EMEA region, Mr Kazmi has also been appointed as a United Nations Alliance of Civilizations Fellow and was selected by the UAE's Vice-President and Deputy Prime Minister, Sheikh Mansour, as an Arab Youth Pioneer. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, as the nations of the world deepened their interdependence, there has been a profound geopolitical and economic shift towards Asia, leading to it being dubbed by many as the “Asian Century”. The rise of this continent—home to around 60% of the world’s population—as a leading force in…

Maxime Duhommet is a quantitative trader based in Paris. He is co-head of Davensi, a crypto platform and digital asset manager, developing a fully-regulated and independent exchange in Europe (Davensi.com). • Bull markets are characterised by a continuous and sustained rise in asset prices. These phases are generally fueled by strong demand, investor optimism, and favourable economic conditions. In cryptocurrencies, these periods are often marked by intense media coverage, a massive influx of new investors and valuations reaching all-time highs. • Bear markets are marked by a prolonged decline in prices. These phases occur when investor confidence wanes, leading to massive sell-offs. In the context of cryptocurrencies, these periods can be exacerbated by unfavourable regulations, exchange platform hacks or corrections following a speculative bubble. • 2013-2014: Bitcoin rose from under…

Matt Barlow is a Lecturer in International Political Economy in the school of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. In his PhD, he explored the ideological challenges of raising export taxes in Argentina in the early-2000s. His current research explores how taxation may create barriers to mobilising domestic resources and to making progress towards the SDGs. In 2019, I spent three months in Buenos Aires conducting fieldwork for my PhD, much of this time based at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella as a Visiting Researcher. Whilst there, aside from my own research agenda, there were also ongoing discussions with colleagues about one of the university’s former master’s students: Javier Milei. Whilst advocating for a fringe doctrine, right-libertarian economics, Milei was becoming an ever more prominent television personality,…

Kwame Yamgnane is a co-founder of Qwasar, a next-generation software engineering school based in California. He previously cofounded Ecole 42 in Paris, one of the most acclaimed innovative computer programming schools of our time. In a country like France, which consistently produces Nobel laureates, Turing Award winners and Fields medalists, there are approximately 900,000 teachers for around 16 million students—a ratio of 1 to 17.7—with an average teacher age of 38 years, according to official sources1. In the Western education model, it takes two decades to produce an "average teacher," and a student-to-teacher ratio of 1 to 15 is considered necessary2. MATHEMATICAL CERTAINTY Now consider Nigeria, with its 220 million inhabitants, including 110 million individuals under 19 requiring education. By Western standards, Nigeria would need 15 million teachers. But how…

Fve years after releasing his book in French, “From the Dream of Globalization to the Nightmare of Populism,” economist Bruno Colmant, a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium, underscores the danger of artificial intelligence exacerbating the crisis of today’s economic and social systems. Is a new economic model emerging with the rise of artificial intelligence? The critical issue revolves around productivity gains. These are vital because economic growth is fundamentally driven by a combination of demographic trends and productivity improvements. Productivity gains are typically distributed between two production factors: capital and labour. The development we’ve seen since the early nineteenth century, with the initial manufacturing economy and machinery replacing human labour, is now amplified to a much greater extent by artificial intelligence. These productivity gains will likely be predominantly,…

Stanislav Akhmedzyanov is Managing Partner at IBC Global, an international consultancy specialising in industrial and warehousing property (ibc-group.kz). For decades, Central Asia—a region home to approximately 70 million people across five post-Soviet states: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan—has remained largely uncharted on the global logistics map. Domestic demand was largely met by facilities inherited from the Soviet era. With few exceptions, there was minimal need for modern warehousing facilities, and infrastructure development attracted little interest. However, over the past ten years, the development of regional logistics and warehouse infrastructure was spurred by new impulses: • The development of China's Belt and Road global infrastructure initiative since 2013, including one of its key components, the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (aka Middle Corridor); • The Covid pandemic, in 2019-2021, which fuelled…

Sandeep Achary, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Statistical Institute, is currently pursuing a PhD as a fellow student at Pompeu Fabra University in Spain. According to the IMF, the Indian economy is projected to grow by 6.8% in FY 2024-25, while China and the USA will grow by 4.6% and 2.7%, respectively. If India continues at that pace, it could surpass the stagnant economies of Japan and Germany by 2027, becoming the world's third-largest economy in terms of GDP. The fiscal deficit, which was at alarming levels in 2021, has been reduced to 5.1% of GDP in FY 2024-25. As for inflation, based on the consumer price index for March 2024, it reaches 4.85% annually, which is well within the mandate. Meanwhile the country—one…

Every September, one of the central events in the field of sustainable development takes place – ceremony of the prestigious World Innovation Award, which honors leaders of the developing world who have made an outstanding personal contribution to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals – the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all – through a systematic effort to implement innovative solutions. Jeffrey D. Sachs, one of the initiators and authors of the SDGs, whose interview you can find in this issue of WEJ, calls them “the supreme test of politics”. The World Innovation Award is organized by the World Organization for Development (WOD), an international non-governmental organization with Special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (2014), Member of the United Nations Global…