Daily chart

The bar chart explains a serious research. So, should be considered their estimation.

Dear Editor,

This is good stuff thanks to the Economist. And not to take away anything from it, it’s more useful to me than the McDonald index.

Now if you allow me to nitpick, being engineer rather than economist in training, it’s intuitively easier to understand the fiscal-flexibility index (the overall) chart if you’d plot the complement of all indices and setting 100 as maximum instead.

For example, under the max. indices scheme,

Egypt and India will get index of 15 each instead of 85;
Argentina and Hungary will get index of 30 each instead of 70;
Russia and Singapore will get index of 70 each instead of 30;
Indonesia and Saudi Arabia will get index of 85 each instead of 15;

And so forth. People usually associate 100 being a perfect score than a zero is.

When are we going to stop counting South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore as emerging economies... I think they have well and truly emerged, no?

Then what makes Dr. Doom believe that India is better placed than other BRIC nations?

RUSSIA is in better position than BRAZIL...
Same with foreign currency reserves, public debt, budget deficit, trade surplus...

So, why "The Economist" always downgrades Russia and upgrades Brazil? Perhaps some investors have lost millions of USD believing politically motivated reports from "The Economist".

The study is obviously based on the loanable funds theory for long-run determinants of interest rates. Interest rates do not change that way.

The vision of the study, identical with the Treasury view, would lead to the wrong idea of expansionary austerity. The recent IMF has been along this line for a couple of decades.

The original role of the Fund was to help developing countries implement expansionary policies at downturns.

(Mainstream new-synthesis economists often criticise the IMF in a similar manner as above and in the sense that the Fund applies the loanable funds theory to short-run determinants of interest rates, but they keep in mind the loanable funds theory for long-run determinants of interest rates. Considering determinants of the schedule of marginal efficiency of capital, however, the loanable funds theory could not be applied to long-run determinants of interest rates, either. When the marginal efficiency of money was extremely low, a mainstream expansionary policy – fiscal or monetary – would only ‘evaporate’, for much of the increased money supply due to the transactions-demand for money encouraged by the authorities would eventually shift from the amount of money held by the transactions- and precautionary-motives to that held by the speculative motives (i.e. the liquidity-preference theory) unless the schedule of the marginal efficiency of money improved. The authorities need to implement policies that would eventually improve the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital, and the mainstream economics lacks the perspective of the relation of long-run determinations of interest rates and the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital).

China, come on, you hear it, where is your stimulus? And make sure you share that with us.

Can some one explain me why Vietnam is so bad placed?

This is blasphemy, how can democratic India rank worse than dictator-communist-onechildpolicy-no Dalai lama-no-internet China?

How can it be? My mind just got blown

I'm curious to see how developed countries would rank based on these same exact six indicators...

Hong-Kong Taiwan and Singapore ans South Korea are considered by UN and IMF as developed economies and countries.

Please clarify by which standards are you referring to. unless erratum.