GLOBAL WARNING THE BIG TEN The Big Emerging Markets and How They Will Change Our Lives By Jeffrey E. Garten BasicBooks 232pp $24 Former Commerce Under Secretary Jeffrey E. Garten presents a provocative argument in The Big Ten: The Big Emerging Markets and How They Will Change Our Lives. The U.S., he says, is dangerously unprepared to deal with the economic and political challenges it will face in the coming decade from Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, and Turkey. These markets, growing two to three times as fast as the developed world and consuming tens of billions of dollars' worth of exports, offer American companies an unprecedented opportunity to sell their goods and diversify in the global market. Garten clearly doesn't think Washington is making it easy enough for business to exploit this opportunity. Now dean of the Yale School of Management, Garten remains an eloquent trade booster. He longs for Washington to continue the job he began with the late Commerce Secretary, Ronald H. Brown--vigorously pushing exports to emerging markets. And he seems to think such sales should take priority over U.S. concerns about human rights, corruption, and even national security. He warns that since Japan and Europe subsidize their exports with foreign aid, the U.S. risks falling behind in supplying the power plants, phones, cars, and clothes the middle classes in emerging markets will need. In prose that is blessedly free of Washington-speak, he frames the challenge in terms of America's historical vocation: ''The country that led the efforts to smash German Nazism, Japa-nese militarism, and Russian communism in the last half-century alone...must take a broader view of its role.'' In places, Garten is vague. A global economy's fierce competition, he argues, means that if the U.S. suffers an economic downturn, it is more vulnerable than ever before to growing exports from abroad. But it's not clear why a hit to America's trade balance from China if U.S. growth flags would be more alarming than one from, say, Japan. And some of Garten's assumptions are puzzling. He excludes Russia from his Big Ten list because of its lawless brand of capitalism. Yet he includes South Africa, although it could be argued that neither the black economy nor the white economy there resembles an emerging market. Garten also has a touching faith in the discipline and independence of capital markets, which he believes can make developing countries toe the fiscal and monetary line. He writes, for example, that Wall Street ''forced Mexico to its knees'' in 1994 after the peso collapsed by pulling out its investments. Garten must be forgetting the $20 billion that the Clinton Administration lent Mexico to tide it over. Garten persuasively points out, however, that U.S. policy toward these markets remains naive. Developing nations don't care to be told how to run their governments, and Washington must be sensitive about pushing its democratic and free-market agenda in other capitals. Americans still believe that people all over the world want to be just like them. It's a risky notion--especially since these new markets will soon be even more powerful than now. BY JOAN WARNER RELATED ITEMS PHOTO: Cover, ``The Big Ten''

Updated June 23, 1997 by bwwebmaster
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