MINT Countries

MINT is an acronym referring to the economies of Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey. The term was originally coined in 2014 by Fidelity Investments, a Boston-based asset management firm, and was popularized by Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs, who had created the term BRIC. The term is primarily used in the economic and financial spheres as well as in academia. Its usage has grown specially in the investment sector, where it is used to refer to the bonds issued by these governments. These four countries are also part of the "Next Eleven".

Thesis

In a column for Bloomberg View a few years after Fidelity coined the term, O'Neill discussed the "MINT" economies:

I spent last week in Indonesia, working on a series for BBC Radio about four of the world's most populous non-BRIC emerging economies. The BRIC countriesBrazil, Russia, India and Chinaare already closely watched. The group I'm studying for this projectlet's call them the MINT economiesdeserve no less attention. Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey all have very favorable demographics for at least the next 20 years, and their economic prospects are interesting.

Policy makers and thinkers in the MINT countries have often asked me why I left them out of that first classification. Indonesians made the point with particular force. Over the years I've become accustomed to being told that the BRIC countries should have been the BRIICs all along, or maybe even the BIICs. Wasn't Indonesia's economic potential more compelling than Russia's? Despite the size of its relatively young population (a tremendous asset), I thought it unlikely that Indonesia would do enough on the economic-policy front to quickly realize that potential.

Now, meeting a diverse group of Indonesiansfrom the leading candidates for the 2014 presidential elections to shoppers in Jakarta's busy mallsI found a healthy preoccupation with the country's economic prospects. "Could Indonesia do what's needed to lift the country's growth rate to 7 percent or more," they were asking, "or would it have to settle for 'just' 5 percent?"

Country data

Data for Columns 2 to 9 from the World Bank.
Data for HDI from the UN Development Programme.

Mexico

The economy of Mexico is the 15th largest in the world in nominal terms and the 11th largest by purchasing power parity, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Since the 1994 crisis, administrations have improved the country's macroeconomic fundamentals. Due to Mexico's rapidly advancing infrastructure, increasing middle class and rapidly declining poverty rates it is expected to have a higher GDP per capita than all but three European economies by 2050. This newfound local wealth also contributes to the nation's economy by creating a large domestic consumer market, which in turn creates more jobs.

The economy contains rapidly developing modern industrial and service sectors, with increasing private ownership. Recent administrations have expanded competition in ports, railroads, telecommunications, electricity generation, natural gas distribution and airports, with the aim of upgrading infrastructure. As an export-oriented economy, more than 90% of Mexican trade is under free trade agreements (FTAs) with more than 40 countries, including the European Union, Japan, Israel, and much of Central and South America. The private sector in Mexico is one of the most important players in the national economy, with the country's single securities market the second largest in Latin America (after Brazil's BM&F Bovespa), and 16 companies on the Forbes Global 2000 list of the world's largest companies in 2008.Forbes