In December 2013 the investment manager Ruchir Sharma was on the road in the Indian states of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, interviewing locals in connection with upcoming elections. Everywhere he went, people “would angrily reel off to the exact rupee” the price increases for potatoes, ghee and?onions over the past five years, Sharma writes in The Rise and Fall of Nations. “Talk of inflation trumped other pressing issues, such as corruption and unemployment.”

Inflation is one of 10 criteria used by Sharma, head of emerging markets and chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management in New York, to assess the prospects of nations big and small. It is a problem, he writes, because it kills growth by discouraging saving, raising the cost of capital and contributing to political instability.

As Sharma’s insights into Indian onion prices suggest, there is nothing theoretical or abstract about his work. His new book adopts the approach that served him well in his 2012 survey of emerging markets, Breakout Nations, considering the views of village barbers alongside those of presidents as he works out whether the fundamentals of the countries he considers suggest a more bearish or bullish stance. For the most part, it is the former that prevails. Sharma notes that when the global financial crisis struck in 2007, more than 60 nations were growing at rates of at least 7 per cent a year; today, a mere nine countries can make that claim.