4/3/15: Composite Activity Indicators for BRIC & Russia: February

Having covered Manufacturing PMIs (http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2015/03/2315-bric-manufacturing-pmi-february.html) for BRICs and Services PMIs (http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2015/03/4315-bric-services-pmis-stronger-growth.html), let's take a look at the data for combined metrics of two sectors.

First, table below summarises the changes in Manufacturing and Services PMIs across all BRICs:

Markit - the source of both PMI data sets - also reports Composite PMI of their own. My data is based on same inputs but takes a more simple approach of combining the two data points for each country. This allows me to take each economy aggregate performance across the sectors and group these economies into BRIC group by weighing their combined PMIs score by each economy's relative position in the global economy.

Here are the results:

And for BRICs excluding Russia:

The above charts show two things:

1. BRICs overall contribution to global growth is positive but weak, although it registered an improvement in February 2015 compared to January.
2. Russia acts as a drag on global and BRICs growth. Major divergence between Russia and other BRICs started in January 2014, which, incidentally tells us that the talk about Russia not belonging to BRIC group on the basis of some structural or trend considerations is bonkers. Until January 2014, co-movement between BRICs ex-Russia and Russia is very strong and divergence from January 2014 on is clearly linked to geopolitical crisis and oil price collapse, rather than due to structural decoupling between BRICs ex-Russia and Russia.