Move aside BRICs, the EAGLES have landed !!

After the enormous marketing success achieved by Goldman Sachs with its BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) report, creating new emerging market acronyms has become the newest fad. HSBC jumped onto the bandwagon with the CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa) and the latest to join the acronym brigade is the Spanish banking group BBVA with its EAGLES !!

Emerging Market Acronym Game (Source: Financial Times)

What the EAGLES approach does differently

BBVA’s rationale is that current groupings like the BRICs pay too much attention to size, and not enough to incremental growth rates.They are rigid and imply an unchanging list of economies on which potential investors should focus. The EAGLES are the 10 countries that will contribute more to global demand over the next decade than the G7 excluding the US. BBVA's economists believe the concept allows better and worse performing economies to move in and out - respectively - of the sample over time.

Ok, so who is it?

EAGLES stands for "Emerging And Growth-Leading Economies" and includes the usual suspects China and India, of course. The other are Brazil, South Korea, Indonesia, Russia, Mexico, Turkey, Egypt and Taiwan.

What's the big deal? Is there anything new?

Nothing much actually. Four of the ten are BRICs and three are CIVETS. The remaining three - Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan - are strong emerging markets since a long time. 

The only interesting thing in the list is in order of importance - Russia is ranked below South Korea and Indonesia. BBVA believes that investors and the general public are still too focused on the BRIC concept. They believe that Russia is not a country which will generate a lot of additional demand and that investors should focus elsewhere.

The link to the report is here.