A few years ago, when a company such as Western Union, the American money transfer group, looked at a country such as Turkey, its employees thought they knew what to expect. Turkey was considered poor, and a source of migrants to places such as Germany. Thus, in money-transfer jargon, it was deemed an “inflow” country, since 90 per cent of the money that was moved across the Turkish border in small-scale wire transfers went into Turkey - not out.
But these days, something rather striking is afoot. According to Hikmet Ersek, CEO of Western Union (who is himself Turkish), money is now starting to flow out of Turkey, not in. That is because Europe is ailing while the Turkish economy has boomed. So while Turks in, say, Germany used to send money to their families in Turkey, during 2012 families in the homeland often ended up helping their kin in Europe - creating outflows that are now estimated at about 30 per cent. Or, as Ersek told me on the sidelines of Davos last month, with a smile of pride and wonder, “It's a huge change.”
That might be an understatement. When the global leaders gather in Davos each year, there is a tendency for them to toss plenty of rhetoric around about “globalisation”, economic “rebalancing” or financial crisis. And these grandiose debates are typically backed up with reams of formal data about gross domestic product - and statistics from bodies such as the Bank for International Settlement about global capital flows.