主题：【原创】中国巴西经济小议兼及印度 -- 葡萄

http://www.usfunds.com/shareholder/Summer_2006_Shareholder_Report.pdf

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China's government recently reported that its GDP grew at a 10-percent clip in the first quarter of 2006, and India's economy is expected to expand almost 9 percent this year. Nearly all of the E-7 countries - and many more in the emerging world - have projected 2006 growth rates surpassing that of the United States and the rest of the G-7.

That growth can be seen in ambitious construction projects in these nations.

China plans to build 14 express highways, six railways and a dozen new seaport facilities before 2010. India invests 3.5 percent of its GDP on power plants, roads and other infrastructure and the government there is financing "industrial townships" to promote more manufacturing. Even Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries, is building hundreds of miles of highways, as well as schools, water systems and the like.

China's energy consumption is expected to be 69 percent higher in 2010 than in 2002, according to the Federal Energy Information Administration. That growth rate is five times higher than the estimate for the United States and more than 15 times higher than Europe.

China, in the midst of a massive infrastructure build-out, used half of the world's cement and 40 percent of the world's steel last year, according to government statistics.

But because of years of low commodity prices and other factors, exploration and development of these now-coveted resources have not kept pace with global population and GDP growth. That has created an Economics 101 scenario - demand is greater than supply, so prices climb.

Not only are populations growing quickly in many developing and emerging nations, so are their incomes and their desires for the types of consumer goods that Westerners have long taken for granted. In the past two decades, China's per-capita GDP has gone up more than tenfold.

According to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), more than 40 percent of the world's economic GDP growth over the next decade is expected to come in China, India, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

By 2010, these "rapidly developing economies" are also expected to account for a third of sales for multinational corporations, according to BCG.

And as those economies expand, there will be greater demand for oil, gold, minerals and other natural resources.

The benchmark CRB Commodity Index has consistently been in record territory in recent months. It is up roughly double in less than five years. Gold, silver and platinum prices have risen 100+ percent since early 2001, while zinc, lead and copper are each up more than 200 percent. For crude oil and natural gas, the price hike is greater than 300 percent. Despite these impressive run-ups, we believe that we are still early in the secular bull market for these and other commodities.

To get some perspective on this enduring rally, you can look at the "Kuznets Cycle," a cycle of economic activity that drives commodities demand.

Economist Simon Kuznets, who came up with the concept of GDP, won the 1971 Nobel Prize for his work to explain infrastructure investment. That work is relevant to what we're seeing today in emerging nations. Kuznets noticed that roads and highways, seaports, airports and other infrastructure are built over a 15- to 20-year period. It is a period of strong jobs creation, and once these pieces are built, the economy is growing and robust.

A good example of this is when the U.S. built interstate highways in the 1950s. This construction work absorbed more than half of the world's commodities. This is very significant as we look at those emerging economies that have policies for infrastructure construction and growing demand for commodities.

Asia's rapid growth is driving this secular bull market. Asia's 3 billion people now consume about 20 million barrels of oil daily, while 300 million Americans consume 22 million barrels per day. The difference is that Asia has been growing at 6 percent per year, twice the U.S. rate. Since 2000, there have not been enough new discoveries of oil, gas and precious metals to meet Asia's demand as they have built infrastructure. This is the most important reason why we are living with ever-higher energy prices.

Emerging economies are also heavy consumers of copper, whose price has been at record levels this spring. Copper inventories hit a 30-year low this past summer, and there have been a host of issues - refining bottlenecks, various labor issues and rising capital costs - that have kept the market tight.

Toyota's Prius hybrid automobile uses five times more copper than a standard gasoline-powered car. With the strong demand growth for hybrids, we will continue to see strong copper demand for products such as the Prius.

In the short term, the biggest domestic risk we see for copper prices is the housing market. The average house contains some 400 pounds of copper in the form of wiring, water pipes and appliances, so if home construction were to slow down dramatically, that could hurt copper prices in the short term. Long-term, there is still much demand around the world without much increase in supply. China has been negotiating energy and minerals deals with South American and African countries as a way to ensure supplies to feed its economy.

When it comes to China, our investment team has a simple philosophy: whatever China needs, get long, and whatever they have as surplus, get it out of the way, because China will just dump it. That happened with both steel and aluminum.

It's very important to be able to track those supply and demand factors. Copper prices took off when China stopped selling copper. Zinc prices were 45 cents a pound last year when China was a net seller, and they're nearly four times higher since the country became a net buyer. China is also no longer exporting silver, whose price is at a 25-year high.