Risks and Rewards in Emerging Market Investments

In light of the recent currency crises in East Asia, this article questions the accepted wisdom that emerging market securities deserve to be included in global portfolios primarily because of their low correlations with more conventional asset classes. The authors suggest that the basic cycle of emerging market loans and securities appears to have been compressed, and its swings accentuated, by the herd-like behavior of global institutional investors. This is not the irrational behavior of crowds infected by investment euphoria, but the rational behavior (however volatile) of a large number of institutional investors with huge stakes in the market, each trying to outperform or at least keep up with the others. While stressing the benefits of foreign capital for emerging nations, Smith and Walter also point to the adverse consequences of abrupt shifts in investor sentiment and capital flows. Citing a recent World Bank study, the authors suggest that the effect of portfolio equity inflows on many developing economies has been a “glut” of foreign exchange and liquidity, which tends to cause inflationary pressure and appreciation of real exchange rates. Such currency appreciation can in turn have unwanted “real” effects, such as increases in trade deficits. Going somewhat “against the grain of the Washington Consensus,” the authors suggest that emerging nations undertake a gradual, though steady movement toward adoption of freemarket policies. In particular, they cite with approval attempts by more successful emerging nations such as Chile and South Africa to limit portfolio capital inflows to avoid this problem of excess liquidity. As the authors conclude, “At no point in their development did now-established countries like Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Spain, and Chile adopt a totally free-market approach. They moved purposefully over decades in that direction, but only at a pace that could be accommodated by the accompanying political thinking and infrastructure-building.”     

On Limits of Uniquely Best Linear Estimators

In a general linear model, it is shown that all admissible linear estimators are limits of linear estimators that are uniquely best at some point in an extended parameter set. The principal result shows that a linear estimator that is uniquely best at a pointW ₂ among multiple linear estimators that are best at a pointW ₁ is the limit of uniquely best estimators at points approachingW ₁ along the line joiningW ₁ andW ₂. Research supported in part by U.S.A.F. Aerospace Research Laboratories under contract F33615-71-C-1463, summer 1973, and in part by Grant DMS-9104811 from the National Science Foundation.     

Strategy as ecology

Microsoft's and Wal-Mart's preeminence in modern business has been attributed to any number of factors--from the vision and drive of their founders to the companies' aggressive competitive practices. But the authors maintain that the success realized by these two very different companies is due only partly to the organizations themselves; a bigger factor is the success of the networks of companies with which Microsoft and Wal-Mart do business. Most companies today inhabit ecosystems--loose networks of suppliers, distributors, and outsourcers; makers of related products or services; providers of relevant technology; and other organizations that affect, and are affected by, the creation and delivery of a company's own offering. Despite being increasingly central to modern business, ecosystems are still poorly understood and even more poorly managed. The analogy between business networks and biological ecosystems can aid this understanding by vividly highlighting certain pivotal concepts. The moves that a company makes will, to varying degrees, affect the health of its business network, which in turn will ultimately affect the organization's performance--for ill as well as for good. Because a company, like an individual species in a biological ecosystem, ultimately shares its fate with the network as a whole, smart firms pursue strategies that will benefit everyone. So how can you promote the health and the stability of your own ecosystem, determine your place in it, and develop a strategy to match your role, thereby helping to ensure your company's well-being? It depends on your role--current and potential--within the network. Is your company a niche player, a keystone, or a dominator? The answer to this question may be different for different parts of your business. It may also change as your ecosystem changes. Knowing what to do requires understanding the ecosystem and your organization's role in it.     

The twilight of science-Last of the ‘gods’

That technology is the world's dominant religion and science its theology, is a theme which I have developed over two decades. Once linguistic hurdles are cleared, this thesis appears self-evident, even trite. The newer proposition in this paper is that just as with all other religions, the public which will no doubt continue to want the fruits (and pay the price) of the techno-religion is not at all sure about the value of the science-theology. We are definitely witnessing the beginning of the end for the first universal theology and its god, science.     

Optimal stationary consumption with stochastic production and resources

Uncertainty about technology and resources is represented in terms of uncertainty about an (exogenous) environment whose successive states form a stationary stochastic process, with probabilities that are unaffected by economic decisions. The successive states of the economy depend both on the environment and on the decisions taken with regard to production and consumption. It is shown that, under conditions that are natural extensions of “neoclassical” conditions in the case of certainty, (1) Capital saturation is possible, i.e., an optimal stationary stochastic program exists, and (2) An optimal program can be sustained by a price system that takes the form of a stationary stochastic process of price vectors. In other words, an optimal stationary program can be sustained by a stochastic “equilibrium,” in which at each date the optimal production decisions maximize expected intertemporal profit, and the optimal aggregate consumption vector has minimum cost among all aggregate consumption vectors yielding no less (social) utility.