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Hak Bin Chua, Ting Lu & team |
Bank of America Merrill Lynch |
First-Place Appearances: 2 Total Appearances: 10 Team Debut: 1998 |
Bank of America Merrill Lynch marks its tenth appearance on this lineup with a repeat first-place finish. Singapore-based Hak Bin Chua, 47, and 39-year-old Ting Lu, who works out of Hong Kong, together direct a group of 12 analysts that wins plaudits for the scope of its coverage. “They have economists in different parts of the world and leverage off each other,” explains one supporter. “They can put all the pieces together — the U.S. Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, the European Union, the Bank of Japan and linkages between them and the developing world, including Asia — and come up with a good global story.” This year, Chua also leads the No. 3 team in Malaysia research; and Lu also co-captains, with David Cui, the top squad in China coverage. The researchers project that recovery throughout the region will continue to be tested by the U.S. Federal Reserve’s winding down of its quantitative easing scheme, though a robust rally in Asia ex-Japan’s exports over the second half of 2014 should offset the worst effects. Largely on the strength of U.S. economic expansion, they expect real gross domestic product growth in the region to improve slightly, to 6.4 percent this year from 6.1 percent in 2013. At the same time, they foresee inflation accelerating slightly but enough to prompt policy rate hikes by central banks of Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan. A longer-term concern, the economists contend, is demographics, which they deem a more reliable predictor of real GDP growth than of market performance. Disparities between Asia’s northern and southern countries will become stark, they advise, with the strongest labor force development over the next decade likely to be seen in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. Thailand will be the lone member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to join China, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea in seeing its working-age population shrink. |
