We’re looking forward to reading this new political risk blog The Call, launched by Foreign Policy and written by Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group. In the inaugural post, Bremmer sets forth four reasons why political risk is going to become more and more important in international business:
So I’d best be clear about my biases up front. I believe that political risk is becoming much more important for the workings of global markets over the next several years. There are four big structural reasons for this:
1) Energy supplies are coming increasingly from politically unstable parts of the world. Think the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea basin, West Africa;
2) Emerging markets-countries in which politics plays a particularly important role in how markets perform already have more influence than ever on the global economy. Their influence will only grow in coming decades, and they will have increasingly powerful seats at the table when important decisions are made;
3) Dangerous technologies are becoming readily available, even for smallgroups of people that until recently could not have imagined access to suchpowerful tools. Iranhas new access to nuclear technology, and West African pirates are usingGPS. Rogue states, organizations, and even individuals are becoming moreimportant accordingly;
4) These trends are intensifying in a world in which the United Statesis increasingly unwilling and unable to fill the role of world’s onlysuperpower. The current global institutional architecture isn’t keeping up withall these changes. It still reflects the post-World War II internationalsystem.