From booze to bulldozers, analysts scour for emerging market data
From phone bills in Lagos to bulldozers in Beijing, analysts are looking creatively at ways to measure the strength of emerging market economies where official data sometimes comes up short.
How much Guinness are Nigerians drinking? How full are hotels in the Gulf? What about enrolment in international schools?
All are methods being used to track the ups and downs of economies where timeliness, transparency and accuracy do not always meet develop market standards.
The explosion of interest in emerging markets - Lipper data shows $90 billion in fund inflows last year - has drawn in many investors who are less familiar with analysing risky assets and need help.
Quarterly economic growth data, for example, is the most comprehensive and complete set of statistics on any developed economy's economic health.
Yet the availability of even this most-basic economic speedometer is fraught with caveats when it comes to emerging markets.
It is released too late to be of much use in the case of many African countries, or not at all in many Middle Eastern countries. In China, meanwhile, this key release arrives unsettlingly early for some.
So some analysts have started looking at other data or even creating their own datasets to assess how investible such markets are.
"In emerging markets it's more difficult (to get good data) than in developed markets, because it's expensive to run a good statistics office - it does not tend to be a priority," said Graham Stock, strategist at frontier fund Insparo, adding: "You have to use proxies."
BOOZE AND BULLDOZERS
Proxies that Stock
Be the first to comment.
