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 -- (with the addition of South Africa in 2010, the BRIC was re-coined BRICS ), 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.
Now, meeting a diverse group of Indonesians — from the leading candidates for the 2014 presidential elections to shoppers in Jakarta’s busy malls — I found a healthy preoccupation with the country’s economic prospects."Could Indonesia do what’s needed to lift the country’s growth rate to 7 percent or more, they were asking, or would it have to settle for 'just' 5 percent?