Archive for the ‘Economy’ Category

William J. Holstein writes about “How Coca-Cola Manages 90 Emerging Markets.” The world’s largest beverage company has delegated major decision making to individual markets, but it maintains its global brand strategy through collaborative practices.

Excerpts:

Ahmet C. Bozer, president of the Coca-Cola Company’s Eurasia and Africa Group, has spent his career demonstrating how a large international company can build a strategy and structure itself to compete in emerging markets. Coca-Cola is one of the most globally active international companies, deriving 80 percent of its sales from outside the U.S., and it is therefore one of the most experienced in tackling emerging markets, including Egypt and Pakistan, where political tension renders the business environment uncertain and Coca-Cola’s strategy has proven resilient.

Bozer, who was born and raised in Turkey, has worked for Coca-Cola since 1990 in various capacities, including operations and finance, as well as leading the Coca-Cola bottling company in Turkey. [...]

S+B: Your late CEO Roberto Goizueta charged the company to “think global, act local” in its strategy. How do you accomplish this?

BOZER: I wish it was as easy as repeating the slogan. The key for international companies is finding the right mix of global and local in their operations. The Coca-Cola brand is global, but it must be locally relevant. We may be giving the same happiness message, the same brand architecture may be communicated, but it has to be done differently in each country.

S+B: Your structure has strong regional managers such as yourself, but headquarters in Atlanta maintains global responsibility for sales, finance, and marketing — and for specific product lines like water or juices. How do you manage this?

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Statement by an IMF Mission to Egypt
Press Release No. 11/394
November 3, 2011

Ms. Ratna Sahay, Deputy Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department and head of the IMF mission in Egypt issued the following statement in Cairo today:

“An IMF mission visited Cairo from October 26 to November 3, 2011, at the request of the authorities, to take stock of recent economic developments and assess financing needs. The mission wishes to thank the authorities for the excellent discussions.

“Egypt’s medium-term economic potential is promising. However, maintaining macroeconomic stability and social cohesion amidst modest short-term growth prospects and a weakening external environment remains challenging. The mission welcomes the authorities’ progress towards preparing a homegrown Egyptian strategy to meet these challenges and implement an inclusive growth and job creation agenda. The IMF looks forward to continuing to engage with the Egyptian authorities.”

http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pr/2011/pr11394.htm

Construction sector in Saudi Arabia this year:

• During the first eight months of 2011, domestic cement sales jumped by 28.6% compared to the corresponding period of 2010.

• Private sector imports of building materials financed through commercial banks (LCs settled and New LCs opened) increased y-o-y in August by 1.7% and 17.5%, respectively following annual increases of 39% and 15% in July. The growth in the new LCs opened indicates that imports of construction materials will continue its growth over the following months.

• The latest data published by Saudi Ports showed that discharges from construction materials increased 7.8% during the first seven months of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010.

Data from GulfBase.com

In a new IMF working paper, Assessing Systemic Trade Interconnectedness – An Empirical Approach, authors Luca Errico and Alexander Massara focus on systemically important jurisdictions in the global trade network, complementing recent IMF work on systemically important financial sectors. Using the IMF’s Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS) database and network analysis, the paper develops a framework for ranking jurisdictions based on trade size and trade interconnectedness indicators using data for 2000 and 2010. The results show a near perfect overlap between the top 25 systemically important trade and financial jurisdictions, “suggesting that these ought to be the focus of risk-based surveillance on cross-border spillovers and contagion. In addition, a number of extensions to the approach are developed that can provide a better understanding of trade dynamics at the bilateral, regional, and global levels.”

Conclusions

The paper has laid out our approach for assessing systemic trade interconnectedness using network analysis and the IMF’s DOTS database. Our results uncover several stylized facts offering additional insights into the changing patterns of global trade over the decade 2000-2010.  We also have shown possible applications of our approach to gain a better understanding of trade dynamics across world regions and the overlapping of trade and financial sectors of systemic importance in the top 25 jurisdictions. Our approach lends itself easily to a wide range of analytical exercises addressing specific global trade issues, as well as global (trade and financial) interconnectedness issues.

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Joe Saddi, Karim Sabbagh, and Richard Shediac (see authors’ profiles) wrote an article about how the the Gulf economies of the Middle East are forming partnerships with other emerging markets, redefining the ancient trade routes that once linked East and West.

Excerpts:

When King Abdullah bin Saud, the current ruler of Saudi Arabia, came to power in August 2005, he wasted little time in demonstrating his vision for the country’s future. His first official overseas visit, in January 2006, was not to U.S. president George W. Bush, U.K. prime minister Tony Blair, or German chancellor Angela Merkel — but to Chinese president Hu Jintao.

The meeting reflected both countries’ desire to forge closer economic ties. Before King Abdullah went on to other emerging markets, including India, Malaysia, and Pakistan, he and President Hu signed an agreement of cooperation in oil, natural gas, and minerals. This agreement built on existing relationships between the countries’ national energy companies, Saudi Aramco and Sinopec, which had formed a partnership in 2005 to construct a US$5 billion oil refinery in eastern China’s Fujian province. In 2011, they signed a memorandum of understanding to build a refinery in Yanbu, on the west coast of Saudi Arabia. Sinopec is also engaged in a joint venture with Saudi Arabia’s petrochemicals giant SABIC; in 2010, they began producing various petrochemical products in a $3 billion complex in the city of Tianjin in northeast China, and have recently announced that they will build a $1 billion–plus facility there to produce plastics.

[...]

But a closer look reveals a separate trend that could shift the economic focus away from the West. Emerging markets are building deep, well-traveled networks among themselves in a way that harks back to the original “silk road,” the network of trade routes between East Asia, the Middle East, and southern Europe, some dating to prehistoric times and others to the reign of Alexander the Great. Most of these routes were central to world commerce until about 1400 AD, when European ships began to dominate international trade.

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The late C.K. Prahalad and his co-author Hrishi Bhattacharyya wrote an article on how companies can integrate three strategies — customization, competencies, and arbitrage — into a better form of organization since, in their view, many multinational business models are no longer relevant.

Excerpts:

During the high-growth years between 1992 and 2007, the globalization of commerce galloped at a faster pace than in any other period in history. Now, amid the chronic unemployment and anti-trade rhetoric of the post-financial-crisis world, some observers wonder whether globalization needs a time-out. However, the experience of multinational companies in the field suggests the opposite. For them, globalization isn’t happening rapidly enough. [...]

The problem is not globalization, but the way our current institutions are set up to respond to this new demand. The prevailing corporate operating model does not work well with the structural changes that have taken place in the global economy.

Most companies are still organized as they were when the market was largely concentrated in the triad of the old industrialized world: the U.S., Europe, and Japan. These structures lead companies to continue building their global strategies around the trade-offs and limits of the past — trade-offs and limits that are no longer accurate or relevant.

One of the most prevalent and pernicious of these perceived trade-offs is the one between centrally driven operating models and local responsiveness. In most companies, an implicit assumption is at play: If you want to gain the full benefits of economies of scale — and to integrate common values, quality standards, and brand identity in your company around the world — then you must centralize your intellectual power and innovation capability at home. You must bring all your products and services into line everywhere, and accept that you can’t fully adapt to the diverse needs and demands of customers in every emerging market.

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In a new paper (Possible Unintended Consequences of Basel III and Solvency II), IMF staff explain that in “today’s financial system, complex financial institutions are connected through an opaque network of financial exposures. These connections contribute to financial deepening and greater savings allocation efficiency, but are also unstable channels of contagion. Basel III and Solvency II should improve the stability of these connections, but could have unintended consequences for cost of capital, funding patterns, interconnectedness, and risk migration.”

Excerpts:

Efforts to strengthen the quality of capital for banks and insurers through Basel III and Solvency II are well advanced. On the one hand, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), the organization responsible for developing international standards for banking supervision, adopted the Basel II framework in 2004 and, in response to the financial crisis, has taken steps to strengthen it in an incremental fashion to form what is now known the Basel III framework (BCBS 2009, 2011a, 2011b, and 2011c). On the other hand, the European Commission (EC) is leading the Solvency II project, in close cooperation with the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA), to develop harmonized standards for insurance supervision within the European Union. A directive was adopted in 2009, and work—which included a series of quantitative impact studies—has been underway to develop supporting rules.

The regional scope of application of the two accords varies. Basel is an  “accord”/agreement with no legal force but potentially global applicability, whereas Solvency II is a legal instrument that will be binding in 30 European Economic Area (EEA) countries4 (27 European Union (EU) states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway).  However, Solvency II has also implications beyond Europe through, for example, its influence on the international standards being developed by the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS), and because external insurance groups will be more easily able to operate in the EU if their home supervisory regimes are considered equivalent.

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A new IMF working paper by Nese Erbil explains:

This paper examines the cyclicality of fiscal behavior in 28 developing oil-producing countries (OPCs) during 1990-2009. After testing five fiscal measures – government expenditure, consumption, investment, non-oil revenue, and non-oil primary balance – and correcting for reverse causality between non-oil output and fiscal variables, the results suggest that all of the five fiscal variables are strongly procyclical in the full sample. Also, the results are not uniform across income groups: expenditure is procyclical in the low and middle-income countries, while it is countercyclical in the high-income countries. Fiscal policy tends to be affected by the external financing constraints in the middle- and high-income groups. However, the quality of institutions and political structure appear to be more significant for the low-income group.

Among the conclusions:

The results confirm that political and institutional factors, as well as financing constraints, play a role in the cyclicality of fiscal policies in the OPCs. Most of the variables on the quality of institutions and the political structure appear to be significant for the low- income group. Two of the variables are significant for the middle-income countries: the composite institution index and checks and balances. None of the institutional variables turns out to be significant for the high-income countries.21 Domestic financing constraints seem to matter for the low-income group. But fiscal policy is affected more by the external financing constraint in the middle- and high-income groups, as they may be more integrated into the global financial system than the low-income countries.

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TradeFlow21 — AFGHANISTAN. The recent epochal events taking place in the Middle East and North Africa (collectively referred to as MENA), starting with Tunisia last December, have created a domino effect in the region.  The reverberation of this movement was felt by some of the most secure governments in the two regions, and one by one we have seen masses of repressed people follow the footsteps of the courageous youth of Tunisia.

Some have called this movement the “Arab Spring” or the “Arab Movement,” however, the “Arab Renaissance” is more befitting since for the first time in generations the overwhelming majority is willing to question the powers of authority.  Respective peoples are no longer willing to stand idle and take direction from one ruler or one family of rulers.  For so many years the gap between the have and have-not has grown in the two regions by leaps and bounds, thus making it more difficult, if not impossible, for the average person or family to grow and enjoy the financial security that only a handful have monopolized. Read the rest of this entry »