Well, if you've come this far and are listening to this video, I assume that you have completed with success, the first two courses in this specialization, which is globalization, economic growth and stability, and that you've also moved on to the third course. You've finished the course for business opportunities and risks in a globalized economy. You've done the quiz successfully, and you've finished your peer reviewed exercise. So, this is really the culmination of a lot of work. I congratulate you for making it this far, and I hope that you start to feel very literate. Very well-equipped with tools in your toolbox to look at a country and make some conclusions about it. That the data is not swimming around you in a chaotic way, that you can actually look at it and say, ''Now I know this, now I know this, and now I can be worried about this.'' So, in this final peer-reviewed exercise, I asked you to pick any country you wanted that had data for six consecutive years for a whole series of variables at the World Bank Databank. You probably had a little trouble finding one. If you were trying to be brave, and looking for unusual countries, unusual in sense of having a lot of public data. So, the first part of the exercise, we thought about market size and growth. Now, this included GDP, and it included demography. Here, there are different things we're looking for. For instance, usually, an investor wants to see a growing economy. So, if the population is growing, if the population is young, and that's why I asked you to look for dependency ratios. If GDP per capita is relatively high, you might want to think about a breaking point between about 12 thousand and up. So, developed countries are in that higher category, developing countries are below. You might have wanted to look at what GDP growth looked like, and again sometimes, it's appropriate for a country to go slower if it's a developed country with high GDP per capita, probably you're going to observe growth rates in the range of one to two percent. If it's a developing country with low GDP per capita, you're going to see faster growth rates and they will be normal, so you might see anything from maybe five percent to 10 percent, and countries can sustain these for a number of years because they're departing from such a low base, there's lot of slack in the economy, they've got a young population that's joining the labor force. So, you're going to want to look for opportunities there, a growing economy, a high or rising GDP per capita. I also asked you to think about the Gini coefficient. Now, there can be risks and opportunities in the Gini coefficient. If it's relatively low, and here we're thinking of the 30 to 40 range, if it's relatively low, you've probably got a stable country where people are relatively satisfied because they're not seeing the huge extremes of rich and poor, probably a big middle class. If however the Gini coefficient is high, so we've gone above 43, 44, 45, and or it's rising, then there are risks there, because this does tend to make a country less stable politically and socially. It does tend to threaten future sustained growth. A high Gini coefficient means more and more of the money is going into few hands, and they don't spend everything they earn. It's the middle class that tends to spend everything they earn. So, these may be some things that you thought about. Is a country growing? Is it growing too much? Is it not growing enough? Is the population growing? What is the Gini coefficient look like? Is it an old country, a young country? So, you may have drawn some conclusions there mostly about opportunities, but there would be risks if the population were shrinking. There would be risks if the country were going into recession, there would be risks if the Gini coefficient were too high or rising. Then, you also wanted to look at inflation. Inflation in the range of one to two percent is normal for developed countries, desirable for developed countries. If it goes above that, we perceive risk. The risk is that maybe the country will overheat and the expansion will die, maybe the central bank will have to raise interest rates to control the inflation, and the expansive will die. Deflation is also risky. Deflation is a symptom of an economy that isn't growing, that's having trouble achieving growth. So, you might have found a country with deflation, you might have noted that as a risk for the market. If we're dealing with a developing country, again, thinking about countries that have incomes per capita of less than about $12,000, then, usually, inflation is it would be normal for inflation to be higher. So, the range of four percent, even five percent, would be normal, acceptable for those countries. If you get into double digits, you're dealing with hyperinflation, and this is very risky. Notice that I didn't ask you to look for unemployment in this exercise, that's because the unemployment statistic is an expensive one and developing countries often do not have good unemployment figures. So, we had to leave that aside in our analysis of risks and opportunities. Then I asked you to move on to fiscal risks and opportunities. Here, there are actually more risks usually than opportunity, so you would be looking for, as you compared government spending and taxes. You'd be looking for the country's deficit, you would be looking to see whether it's rising or stable or falling. Now, if deficit is rising, you would want that to happen at a time when the economy is declining. That's when it would be appropriate. So, you would be worried about a country that's growing fast or steadily, and yet its' fiscal deficit is high or rising. That country might have the problems we described in the United States, that it could come to a place where taxes will have to be raised, government spending will have to be cut, this could cause political instability, this could cause uncertainty among foreign investors. The interest rate could go up, the currency could go down. So, all of those things, if you see a deficit, this rising at the wrong time, or that is chronic, is registered every year. Remember, if I'm a business, I might not be too happy to see my taxes go up, this is one of my costs. If I'm a business, and interest rates go up, I may pay higher interest rates. Even if I don't, if I'm getting the money from somewhere else, my customers will pay higher interest rates, and demand may shrink. So, these are some of the things we would want to think about on the fiscal front. I asked you to look at the debt, and remember, we had some rules about debt. You won't have all the information about weather debt is foreign or domestic, who holds it? What the cost is of borrowing? Some of that information we don't have at this very general level, where we're operating. But in general, we we would be looking for a country where the debt is rising at the right time, or where the debt is stable or falling, that would be something positive. If you were thinking about the interest rate and you were thinking about the rule of thumb we developed in the first course, you might have compared your interest rate with the inflation rate, and you might have asked yourself if real interest rates were positive, which is normal, you don't want them too high, or if they're negative. Now, if they're negative, there's a chance that if the country is growing fast, that a bubble will develop. So, this may be something else you asked yourself. Finally, we looked at external opportunities and risks. So here, I ask you to just think about the current account surplus and deficit. Now, you have a template from the other courses in this specialization, and from some of the exercises you've done in this capstone of what the risks and opportunities are for current account deficit countries, for current account surplus countries. Remember, they have to do with demand. Deficit countries have plenty of demand, but surplus countries rely on foreign demand. They have to do with access to international financing. Deficit countries have to borrow abroad in order to cover their current account deficit or the excess consumption. If interest rates are going up and foreigners are worried about their ability to keep paying, this is a risk. If their current account surplus country, remember, they're lending to other countries, and then there's a risk derived from the credit worthiness of those countries, always think of Germany lending to Greece, and the risks that this entailed. So, we think about credit worthiness as well as a third risk, and we think about currency. Remember that the currency will like to fall all other things remaining equal, if the country has a current account deficit. It will like to rise all other things remaining equal if the country has a current account surplus. Then, I ask you just to think in general about migration. I asked you to look up the net migration figure, to see whether people were coming into that country or leaving that country. If people are leaving that country, then we have probably a risk of a brain drain, and this does happen in many developing countries, and the businessman or a business woman investing in the country might not find qualified workers, because they're leaving to get higher wages elsewhere. If there's net inward immigration, then we would expect all of the benefits of immigration and abundant labor force, low wages, rising demand, which are all positive elements for business as long as society does not get frustrated with the immigration levels and start to react and ask for immigration to be stopped, and start to vote for populous solutions. So, these are just some thoughts of what you might have encountered in this third part of the exercise, of this third part of the capstone. As I said, this one is very open ended. You may have found some things that I didn't mention, but I think most of what you will have discovered in your study of the data is covered in this discussion. You might want to go back to that third course business opportunities and risks in a globalized economy, to see if I discuss a situation like you find in the data. But hopefully, you will have been able to take all of your tools that you developed in the first, and second, and third course, and applied them to the country of your choice, and learn some things that you didn't expect to find about the risks and opportunities that it provides for an investor.
