Decisions had to be made on the basis of unreliable data from a sophisticated industrial economy: government statistics in emerging-market economies are often even more unreliable, making the IMF's job that much more difficult.

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Since the 1980's, emerging market economies, like those of China and Russia, have become increasingly sophisticated in the way they finance their respective governments and affiliated companies -- transitioning from reliance on syndicated commercial bank loans and Western government funding vehicles to the private capital markets (i.e. the issuance of stocks and bonds).

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His spending program, known locally as the Economic Transformation Plan, is a bid to drag Malaysia out of the so-called middle-income trap, which forces many emerging economies to compete with each other in producing cheap exports instead of developing more-sophisticated, value-added products.

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