Passa ai contenuti principali

ABICI

Acronym for a group of growing economies: Africa, Brazil, India, China and Indonesia.

published on: Schott's Vocab

Reporting for Time on this year’s Global Forum in South Africa, Michael Elliott commented on the fragile economic recovery taking place in the developed economies of the Atlantic region, and spotlighted the “tremendous” performance of “what we will soon have to stop calling the developing world”:China grew by 8.7% in 2009, according to official figures. India showed excellent growth too, and even in Africa — so long dismissed by seers as an underperformer – growth hit 2% before the recession took hold, which followed years when the continent was growing at the historically robust rate of 6% or more.This isn’t simply a function of the famous BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India and China – setting the pace. Indeed, as veteran global economist Kenneth Courtis of Themes Investment Management pointed out, Russia has fallen out of the club of most-favored developing economies, having been unable (so far) to use its endowment of natural resources to build truly world-class companies. With Indonesia increasingly catching the attention of business leaders, and Africa too, it might be time to try a new acronym: ABICI, for Africa, Brazil, India, China and Indonesia. Whatever you call them, the performance of the leading economies of the developing world has been sufficiently robust that political leaders like Rob Davies, South Africa’s Minister for Trade and Industry, were able to trumpet the potential of south-south trade – while acknowledging that even the best-performing southern economies had been hurt by the continuing weakness in the rich world.

Commenti

Post popolari in questo blog

Little platoons

There's no reference to Hegel in the Tory manifesto, but there is an allusion to one of the founding fathers of conservative thought, Edmund Burke. The "institutional building blocks of the Big Society", the document reads, "[are] the 'little platoons' of civil society". “Little platoons" is a phrase that occurs in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the classic expression of conservative scepticism about large-scale attempts to transform society in the image of abstract ideals. The Tories today use it to refer to the local associations that would go to form a "broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation". The problem is that, for Burke, little platoons weren't groups that you volunteer to join; they were the "social subdivisions" into which you are born - the kind of traditionalism you would have thought Cameron's rebranded "progressive" Conservatives would want to avoid. T

Microsoft Language Portal

Microsoft Language Portal:  a bi-lingual search portal for finding translations of key Microsoft terms and general IT terminology. It is aimed at international users and partners that need to know our terminology for globalization, localization, authoring and general discovery.  It contains approx. 25,000 defined terms, including English definitions, translated in up to 100 languages as well as the software translations for products like Windows, Office, SQL Server and many more.

Football or soccer, which came first?

With the World Cup underway in Brazil, a lot of people are questioning if we should refer to the "global round-ball game" as "soccer" or "football"? This is visible from the queries of the readers that access my blog. The most visited post ever is indeed “ Differenza tra football e soccer ” and since we are in the World Cup craze I think this topic is worth a post. According to a paper published in May by the University of Michigan and written by the sport economist Stefan Szymanski, "soccer" is a not a semantically bizarre American invention but a British import. Soccer comes from "association football" and the term was used in the UK to distinguish it from rugby football. In countries with other forms of football (USA, Australia) soccer became more generic, basically a synonym for 'football' in the international sense, to distinguish it from their domestic game. If the word "soccer" originated in Eng