Investing in emerging markets requires a careful analysis of potential risks and benefits that vary greatly from country to country. Informed investors and firms must devise their own system of assessing risk when considering investments in these regions-systems that often omit influential factors and fail to respond flexibly to swiftly changing conditions, be they political, economic, or otherwise. Cracking the Emerging Markets Enigma outlines a rigorous, comprehensive, and practical framework for evaluating the opportunities and, more importantly, the risks of investing in emerging markets. Built on a foundation of sound research on foreign direct and portfolio capital flows, Andrew Karolyi's proposed system of evaluation incorporates multiple dimensions of the potential risks faced by prospective investors in an empirically coherent framework. These dimensions of risk reflect the uneven quality or fragility of the various institutions designed to assure integrity in capital markets. By distilling these analyses into a numerical scoring system, Karolyi has devised a way to assess emerging markets by different dimensions of risk and across all dimensions together. This novel assessment framework has been tested in the private sector to great success. Researchers, students, firms, and both seasoned and novice investors are poised to gain a clear understanding of how to evaluate potential investments in emerging markets to maximize profit.
PART I UNDERSTANDING THE RISKS IN EMERGING MARKETS ; Chapter 1 Accepting the Challenge ; Chapter 2 The Emerging Market Landscape ; Chapter 3 A Primer on Empirical Methodology ; PART II BUILDING THE EMERGING MARKETS RISK INDICATORS ; Chapter 4 Market Capacity Constraints ; Chapter 5 Operational Inefficiencies ; Chapter 6 Foreign Accessibility Restrictions ; Chapter 7 Corporate Opacity ; Chapter 8 Limits to Legal Protections ; Chapter 9 Political Instability ; PART III VALIDATING THE RISK INDICATORS ; Chapter 10 Do the Emerging Market Risk Indicators Work? ; Chapter 11 Making Sense of the Emerging Market Swoon of 2013 ; PART IV THE EMERGING MARKETS ENIGMA CRACKED? ; Chapter 12 Final Remarks and a Few Cautions ; Data Appendixes