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BRICS Business Magazine English Edition No.4

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About BRICS Business Magazine

BRICS Business Magazine is a bookazine —

a book-like magazine – addressed to global investors, businessmen, politicians, and experts.

A business and humanitarian publication on rapid-growth markets, it is issued four times a year and explains how to understand others.

The goal of this project is to organize a direct information exchange between the BRICS countries and other emerging markets.

We define a bookazine as a thick magazine with complex printing which is designed for slow reading and filled not in accordance with a constant set of sections, but rather in accordance with the topics chosen. Our bookazine includes (with occasional exceptions) three main kinds of data:

essays and columns that would fit into “Opinions” or “Recommendations” sections
indices, ratings, and rankings
business cases

Industry and event projects as well as investment guides are featured as special add-ons.

Authors & Experts

Karl Johansson

EY Regional Managing Partner

Justin McGuirk

Winner of the Venice Architectural Biennale’s Golden Lion Award, columnist for The Guardian

Ndubuisi Ekekwe

Ndubuisi Ekekwe

President of the First Atlantic University

Alexei Chaplygin

Alexei Chaplygin

Education Ranking Director at Interfax

Bill Hutchison

Executive Director of EY’s Center for Smart City Innovation, Chairman of i-CANADA Alliance

Jane Playdon

Education Writer for TopUniversities.com

Denis Konanchuk

Denis Konanchuk

Head of the SKOLKOVO Education Development Centre

Ricardo Hausmann

Ricardo Hausmann

Former Minister of Planning of Venezuela, Professor of the Practice of Economic Development of Harvard University

Raghuram Rajan

Governor of the Reserve Bank of India

Dani Rodrik

Albert O. Hirschman Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study

Vasily Baburov

Urbanist and architecture critic

Charles Robertson

Charles Robertson

Global Chief Economist at Renaissance Capital

Saskia Sassen

Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology Co-Chair of the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University

Andrés Velasco

Andrés Velasco

Former presidential candidate and Finance Minister of Chile

Joschka Fischer

Joschka Fischer

Former Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany

Sergey Zhvachkin

Sergey Zhvachkin

Governor of Tomsk Oblast, Russia

Jorge G. Castañeda

Jorge G. Castañeda

Former Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University

Wilson Nunes Martins

Wilson Nunes Martins

Governor of the state of Piauí, Brazil

Alexander Bazarov

Alexander Bazarov

Member of the Executive Board and Senior Vice President of Sberbank of Russia, Deputy Head of Sberbank CIB

Robert J. Shiller

Robert J. Shiller

2013 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University

Kenneth Rogoff

Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund

Javier Solana

President of the ESADE Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics, former Secretary General of NATO

Eugenia Slouchak

Eugenia Slouchak

Managing Partner at Europe Finance

Jaswant Singh

Former Minister of Finance, Foreign Minister and Minister of Defence of India

Andrei Sharonov

Andrei Sharonov

Dean of Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO, Moscow city’s Mayor Advisor

Zola Tsotsi

Chairman of the Board of Directors at Eskom Holdings

Li Tie

Director-General of the China Center for Urban Development

All Authors & Experts

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The Economics of Anxiety and Happiness

Alexander Bazarov

Banker Alexander Bazarov knows more about the crisis than many. He looks beyond the world of finance and economics in order to show the technological, social and psychological root causes behind many of the developments of the modern world. But as he is Member of the Executive Board and Senior Vice President of Sberbank of Russia and Deputy Head of Sberbank CIB, business obviously comes first.

Economy

Natural allies

“Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still”. This Chinese saying gives us an insight about the developed and emerging world over this last half century. It is important not to underestimate the prospects of China and other developing markets as well as to overestimate prospects of Western Europe, and vice-versa.

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Syria’s Balkan Tragedy

Joschka Fischer

If the agreement to resolve the Syrian issue is implemented impeccably, Barack Obama may be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. However, the opposite scenario is also highly likely, with Syria running the risk of reliving the tragic history of Bosnia.

Opinion

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Disgruntled Democracies

Jorge G. Castañeda

The wave of public unrest that engulfed Latin America came as a logical consequence of the problems caused by the rapid economic growth of the region’s countries.

Opinion

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Bubbles Forever

Robert J. Shiller

Market bubbles are not unlike epidemics. They grow and subside, but they are never over. Like in short novels, nobody knows what to expect in the end.

Opinion

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Postindustrial False Start

Contemporary emerging economies leave out the stage of industrial development much faster than early industrializers used to. The social, political and economic consequences of this process are not clear.<span>photo by Andrzej Barabasz</span>

Opinion

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Europe’s Smart Asian Pivot

Shifting eastwards, Europe must be smart, acting as a single force rather than sticking to bilateral agendas.

Opinion

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Are Emerging Markets Submerging?

The economic slowdown in the emerging markets is merely a warning shot indicating that things may get worse.

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Emerging Markets’ Nirvana Lost

Andrés Velasco

The falling prices for raw materials, the flight of capital from the emerging markets, the drop in exchange rates… It seems that fortune that used to smile upon the developing countries in recent years no longer favours them. And they have nowhere to run from these economic hardships.

Opinion

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The End of the Emerging-Market Party

Ricardo Hausmann

Enthusiasm for emerging markets has been evaporating this year, and not just because of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s planned cuts in its large-scale asset purchases. Emerging-market stocks and bonds are down for the year and their economic growth is slowing. To see why, it is useful to understand how we got here.

Opinion

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Hundred Shades of India

When judging about India’s economy people tend to run to extremes. Meanwhile, stripping out both the euphoria and the despair will probably bring us closer to the truth about the country.

Opinion

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Big Game. No Rules

China, India and Japan are stepping into a great game, with Asia’s key superpower’s status at stake. The problem is there are scant rules in place to manage how it will be played.

Opinion

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Emulating the Future

Charles Robertson

In boosting budget spending and letting debt levels go up, Russia is increasingly at risk of becoming a new Greece, rather than a new Australia or Canada – unless real reforms are made.

Economy

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Developing in the Dark

Sixty percent of Africa’s population live in the dark – they simply do not have access to electricity. The remaining 40% experience power blackouts almost weekly. Yet the kilowatt-per-hour cost is twice as high in Africa as in other developing economies. In an interview with BRICS Business Magazine, Zola Tsotsi, Chairman of the Board of Directors at Eskom Holdings – a company that supplies electricity to nearly half of the African continent – talks about how his team is trying to overcome this serious problem.

Economy

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“They Said Poverty Would Always Be with Us. Well Maybe Not”

The World Bank chief remains an outsider with big ambitions.

Portrait

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Gebrselassie Intends to Lead Ethiopia with a Message: Anything is Possible

The greatest runner of all time says democracy can’t come overnight as he targets a new career in politics. But he hopes he can lift the pace of progress.

Portrait

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The Greatest Minds of the Developing World

BRICS Business Magazine brings into the limelight 25 of the most renowned scientists of the emerging world, the winners of the top international awards in science. The full list of laureates can be found at the end of the article.

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Green vs. Brown

Denis Konanchuk

The educational landscape is shifting in front of our very eyes, and the changes are irreversible. Not all traditional academic institutions are likely to survive: they will have to either radically adapt, or die. They will be replaced by new, progressive, high-tech education projects, known in the expert community as ‘greenfield.’

Education

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Gaudeamus igitur

BRICS Business Magazine has joined forces with QS to assess developing-country universities.

Education

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BRICS Education in the Global Race

Jim O’Neill, former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, coined the BRIC acronym in 2001, predicting that the BRICs would overtake the six largest western economies by 2041. But any economic growth has to be supplemented with the ability of a population to gain knowledge and qualifications. The annual QS World University Rankings assess universities worldwide; Jane Playdon looks at where the BRICS fit in.

Education

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The Power of Knowledge

Alexei Chaplygin

The business index, the environmental efficiency index, the corruption perception index – the world has long grown accustomed to using various ranking systems to assess countries. The international ranking systems for universities that have emerged over the last decade have given us the chance to look at countries from an educational perspective. Alexei Chaplygin looks at the standing of the BRICS countries in these ‘league tables’ and explains why Russia needs its own global university ranking system.

Education

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From Russia with a Degree

Russians are well accustomed to having ‘two capitals’ – Moscow and Saint Petersburg. By the same token, Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) and Saint Petersburg State University (SPbU) enjoy a special status in the country. These friends and rivals embody Russia’s higher education system, with all of its pluses and minuses. BRICS Business Magazine asked the rectors of both universities the same questions – about international rankings, their institution’s place in the world, and where they are heading.

Education

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The New Gunpowder

Ndubuisi Ekekwe

To survive in Africa during the ‘post-extraction era’ one needs to place greater emphasis on education, says Dr. Ndubuisi Ekekwe. And that is precisely why he is currently building a technological institute in Nigeria, slated to become Africa’s answer to MIT.

Education

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Searching for the Meaning

Andrei Sharonov

From Day One the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO billed itself as something out of the ordinary in business education. In this interview, the school’s new dean Andrei Sharonov explains what it is all about, and who studies what at this academic institution. He also speaks about Moscow’s strategic goals, having recently left a position in the city administration.

Education

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The Clash of Academic Civilizations

India has the third-largest Muslim population in the world, just behind Indonesia and Pakistan. Today nearly 165 million Indians practice Islam – representing more than 10% of the world’s entire Muslim population. Two educational centers that emerged within this gigantic community could easily be included in a list of the most influential academic institutions because of the footprints they have made in world history.

Education

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In the Urban Net

From London to São Paulo, from Chicago to Johannesburg, from Zurich to Mumbai – the whole world is entangled in a complex network of inter-industry ties connecting global cities. To be truly transnational, a business has to be present in a multitude of different cities both large and small that are often far from perfect. This serves as yet more practical evidence of the fact that the world is growing increasingly multipolar.

Urbanism

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How Smart is Your ‘Smart City’ and Why Should You Care?

Dozens of urban development projects, from Malaysia to Siberia, claim to be technologically advanced, comfortable and ‘sophisticated,’ with a cognitive-cultural economy to boot. They all need to sort out what they really are – and whether or not their plans are obsolete.

Urbanism

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Role Model

Brazil’s Curitiba is a model of the ‘smart city’ not just for developing, but also for developed, countries. Most of the key challenges that a modern metropolis faces – including environmental, transportation, social and economic problems – were successfully tackled in this city as early as fifty years ago.

Urbanism

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A Beauty That Could Not Save the World

Oscar Niemeyer was one of the founders of the Brazilian modernist school of architecture. He also helped to design a new capital city, Brasília. Built on a desert plateau, the city became a perfect example of the modernist dream brought to life. It is both an architectural triumph of the 20th century and its greatest urban development failure.

Urbanism

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Seven Pieces of Good News

Positive social shifts can occur, and the quality of city life improve, thanks to changes in systems of governance, improved and more efficient infrastructure, and properly developed public spaces. Moscow Urban Forum has prepared a brochure entitled 33 Projects that Changed Cities. BRICS Business Magazine has selected seven of those stories which convey the beauty of efficient solutions and teach us that tangible results can be achieved even in the face of scarce resources.

Urbanism

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The Celestial Empire Goes Urban

China is engaging in a new urbanization spree intended to turn hundreds of millions of former peasants into city dwellers, creating a huge source of long-term economic growth based on domestic consumption.

Urbanism

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Slum, Willing and Able

The slums of Mumbai have become one of this Indian city’s landmarks. But while filmmakers are telling stories about people trying to get out of them, some researchers claim they are economically vibrant, and do not require heavy-handed reform.

Urbanism

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How to Beat China in China

Only about a quarter of Fortune 200 companies will rely solely on organic growth in China. As companies gain experience in M&A and joint ventures, they are finding the best approaches – and quickly adapting.

Practice

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Admit It.

Despite a series of revelations for The Observer about the brutal conditions in garment factories, companies, Western consumers and India are still complicit in turning a blind eye.

Investigation

Alternative Brazil

Eugenia Slouchak

Investments made by high-net-worth Brazilian individuals into hedge funds are double the average in the rest of the world. Almost one quarter of every large Brazilian investor’s portfolio is accounted for by alternative investments. The reason behind this is the transparency of this industry and strong government regulation.

Finance

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Welcome to Piauí

Wilson Nunes Martins

Brazil’s sustainable macroeconomic indicators and continued consumer boom are an excellent incentive for foreign investments. To expedite this process however, the government will have to tackle a number of significant challenges, including defeating bureaucracy and implementing tax reform.

Power

Siberian Rules

Sergey Zhvachkin

Tomsk Oblast seems to have found a way to successfully combine its raw-materials-based economy with innovative projects, says the region’s governor Sergey Zhvachkin. He invited foreign investors to engage in dialogue.

Power

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Edge city

A reporter from The Guardian got into a car with his friend, a photographer, and drove counter clockwise around the non-tourist suburbs of Brazil’s largest city. The trip culminated in a book, fragments of which are published in BRICS Business Magazine. Having visited São Paolo’s suburbs, Justin McGuirk had a chance to act both as an anthropologist and urban developer. His story will help to fill various lacunae that one is inevitably confronted with when trying to understand one of the largest metropolises of the world from inside its business quarters.

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Claustrophobia

3.7 square meters of living space: homes in Hong Kong can be that small. Early this year the local Society for Community Organization (SoCO) published a series of photos featuring the poor, the lonely and the unemployed of one of Asia’s richest cities. The project’s primary objective was to raise awareness in the international community of Hong Kong’s housing problem and the fate of the hundreds of thousands of people not living in decent conditions.

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A Map of Inequality

The uneven distribution of income is considered a veritable bane for developed and developing countries alike.

Official partners