Career Focus

Globalization and Emerging Markets is designed for students who will be investing, managing a business or nonprofit, or working for a government in an emerging or frontier market, as well as for those who wish to acquire a richer conceptual understanding of the nature of capitalism, globalization, and economic development worldwide. The unit of analysis of the course ranges from the international system as a whole through individual countries, alone and in comparative perspective, to multinational and domestic companies operating in emerging markets. Students are asked to adopt the perspective of different decision-makers, such as politicians, technocrats, investors, and managers. For instance, students may have to take the perspective of a large-cap mining firm in Mongolia, a domestic conglomerate in the Philippines, a muckraking foreign-run hedge fund in Russia, or the Prime Minister of Bhutan considering the development of a new hydropower project. Most of the cases are set beyond the so-called BRICs of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, in today’s “frontier” markets that are only beginning to attract the attention of mainstream investors, and some are purposefully historical in order to give insight into the evolution of the world economy and the strategies once pursued by states and companies in currently developed countries when they first emerged. The course should, in short, appeal to anyone considering spending part of their career working, investing, or thinking outside of the major developed markets.

Educational Objectives

The majority of economic growth is now occurring in countries that are not historically wealthy high-income democracies, and where many of the textbook assumptions regarding how markets function—such as the enforcement of contracts, anti-trust laws, universally low or absent tariffs, governments acting as referees rather than players—often do not hold. These trends and characteristics provide a unique set of opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors in the developed world and within emerging markets themselves, as well as for politicians and stakeholders searching for paths to development. But they also introduce significant risk for those doing business in the developing world. GEM provides frameworks to understand the processes of economic growth and development; to develop contextual intelligence regarding emerging markets; to manage within a weaker or less formalized institutional environment; and to think globally and dynamically about capitalism.

Course Organization

GEM consists of three interrelated modules that consider growth and business opportunities in emerging markets from complementary perspectives. First, we work through a framework to understand the process of economic growth and development, and in so doing develop the ability to analyze an emerging market at the level of the country. Second, we examine companies that need to understand this macro view in order to make cross-industry investment decisions as well as navigate the unique contexts of emerging market. The final module looks at the relationship between states and markets in globalization and between the developed and developing parts of the world economy. The course uses a variety of country and company cases from more than 20 different emerging and frontier markets to accomplish these objectives. The cases range from country cases on some of the fastest-growing economies in the world to cases on mining, gas, banking, infrastructure, retail, technology, tourism, private equity, and hedge fund companies operating in emerging markets.

Other EC courses that complement this course:

Energy, MITI, IMaGE, and BBOP.

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