Nobuyuki Saji Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co.
The buy side says: “He is very knowledgeable about Asia, especially China, and very good at explaining it with numbers and examples.”
In first place for a tenth straight year is Nobuyuki Saji of Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co. In October the 52-year-old economist published a report on the Lewisian Turning Point — the time in which industrial wages shoot up as the supply of surplus labor slows — in nations throughout the region; Saji predicted that China would reach the turning point in 2010, but the countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations were still nearly a decade away. Thus, “we see the risk of a slowing down of Chinese economic growth and higher potential of Asean countries,” he told clients. In January the Asian Development Bank revised its outlook to project that real gross domestic product growth for Asean countries would be 8.6 percent for 2010, not the 8.2 percent predicted in September (which itself was a revision of the ADB’s original forecast of 7.3 percent; it has not revised its 2011 forecast of 7.3 percent growth). In February the Chinese government announced that it expects GDP growth to slow to 7 percent for 2011, down from about 10 percent in 2010. “Economists generally have world views that are either excessively broad or mired in the minutiae, but Saji-san can combine the two,” observes one portfolio manager.
Polling and tabulation of data as well as reporting on the sector profiles were completed before the March 11 Tohoku earthquake.