Talking at the American Association of Port Authorities\u2019 Spring Conference in Washington, Bob West of WorleyParsons explained that last year, emerging nations on average grew more than 5%, with some, such as China, growing at a stunning rate of around 9% or 10%, but keeping this pace up \u201cis actually very difficult\u201d and the gap this year should close a little.<\/p>\n
However, he pointed out to PS<\/em> that the mechanism behind this narrowing of growth rates is capacity constraints. He said: \u201cIt simply means that some of these emerging economies are at present bumping their heads on their particular ceilings – for a while\u201d.<\/p>\n These capacity constraints are different in nature depending on the country, Mr West explained. \u201cColumbia, for example, has a great potential to export yet more coal, but not enough coal terminals to do it, while Argentina\u2019s ports have clearly been identified as a bottleneck to higher grain export volumes.\u201d<\/p>\n On the other hand, he added, Panama has a shortage of good domestic engineers: although it has invested in training, it\u2019s present plans to spend $13bn on infrastructure means it will have to find the engineers from somewhere else.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you look at countries that are pushing at their limitations, they turn out, politically and economically, to be the most open to global trade. They actively pursue free trade agreements, open doors when it comes to foreign investment, and usually they want to open the way for greater collaboration.\u201d<\/p>\n The key word is, according to Mr West, \u201copen\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the figures come in for 2011, they might point to a narrowing of that widening growth-rate gap between the mature and emerging markets. But dont open the champagne.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":8197,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-8196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-north-america"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8196"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8198,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8196\/revisions\/8198"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8196"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=8196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}