Eagles, civets, tigers – in the early 20th century this could have been a respectable menagerie. Now, appropriated by economists 100 years on, they represent just a handful from the lexicon increasingly used to express big predictions on the global economy.

Pooled by Jim O'Neill in 2001, the Brics - Brazil, Russia, India and China - were the behemoths of their respective regions with greatly different characteristics, strengths and weaknesses, which have yielded similarly mixed results over the past decade. Now the talk is of the Mints - Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey - which again gathers together a diverse group of nations unlikely to follow a common trajectory in the years to come.