The global economic changes are not only challenging the traditional world order, they are also throwing up new – and therefore confusing – acronyms. So, just in case you’re not too sure about the terms for the new groupings of growing economies, they are:

• BRIC: Brazil, Russia, India and China.
• N-11 (the ‘next 11’): Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey and Vietnam.
• MAVINS (which, in 2010, took over from the ‘N-11’): Mexico, Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Nigeria and South Africa.
• CIVETS (believed to be – by the Economist Intelligence Unit – the ‘second-tier emerging markets’): Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa.

Comment: Isn’t it great how these countries arrange their economic growth rates to accord with an order in which we can make a pronouncible word from the initial letters of their countries’ names? Of course, the ‘N-11’ countries didn’t – which is, presumably, why this term isn’t used now.

So, these days, how important is it that, as an emerging economy, your country’s name begins with a vowel – or, indeed, a consonant? Will future political alliances be determined by the appropriateness of juxtaposing the initial letters of the participating countries’ names – in some form of global ‘Countdown’?

Faced with such tough linguistic questions as these, who’d be an economist, or a politician?