Ruchir Sharma began writing about economics in India when he was 17. During the summer before starting college, he was enlisted by a fledgling newspaper in New Delhi to put together a column on global foreign exchange markets. After a few months, the Economic Times, the country’s leading business paper, tapped him to help expand their international coverage. “India was opening up in 1991, ’92, integrating with the rest of the world,” Sharma says.
His column caught the attention of Indians working on Wall Street, which led Morgan Stanley to hire him in its Mumbai office. In a 25-year career at the firm, he rose to become head of emerging markets and chief global strategist. At Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Sharma built a system for evaluating the relative attractiveness of developing countries based on “10 rules,” or criteria that matter to economic and market performance—population, for instance. Since economic growth is a function of people and their productivity, demographic changes affect output: Aging societies tend to grow more slowly. Other criteria include inflation, politics and debt.
