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Mexico's tourism authority is building a 1,500-kilometer rail link.
Indonesia plans to build 25 new airports in the next three years.
And Saudi Arabia is planning a city 170 kilometers in length, called "The Line", in the middle of the desert.
Money doesn't matter in any of these projects because it is there, in abundance.
However, it does not come from bubbling tax revenues or oil wells.
Rather, it comes from foreign investors.
These are currently scrambling to give emerging countries their money.
You sense high returns.
But this is a dangerous game for both sides.
Saudi Arabia only raised five billion dollars in government bonds last week, demand was enormous, with 20 billion dollars being offered to the country by investors.
Riyadh was able to depress interest rates sharply, and the premium for bonds with a twelve-year term over US bonds is just 1.3 percentage points.
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But the country also brought papers with a 40-year term to the woman and man.
In most other countries there are no such long terms; the longest term of German bonds, for example, is 30 years.
After all, who knows what the world will look like 40 years from now.
Source: WORLD infographic
Investors are currently not concerned about that.
Mexico and Indonesia even issued 50-year bonds in the past few weeks and were very well received.
Indonesia received the capital at the most favorable terms ever.
The country will have to pay just 3.35 percent interest over the next five decades.
Investors are showering the emerging markets with money.
In January, therefore, they raised more capital through new bonds than in any previous January, $ 121 billion in a single month.
“This is a tsunami that we are currently experiencing,” says Sergej Gontscharow, emerging market expert at Vontobel Asset Management.
A debt tsunami that will one day also cost victims.
Source: WORLD infographic
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But investors only see the chance for quick profit.
Because the emerging countries were also hit hard by the Corona crisis, some even more severely than the western industrialized countries.
In the Philippines the decrease was almost ten percent, in Mexico 8.5 and in India eight percent.
But now there are signs of an equally strong ascent.
India's economy, for example, is likely to grow by 11.5 percent this year.
The situation is similar in many other emerging markets, while Europe is still stuck in lockdown and growth forecasts are already being reduced again.
“We forecast strong economic growth for the emerging markets in 2021, which should further widen the gap to the developed countries,” says Patrick Zweifel, chief economist at Pictet Asset Management.
Source: WORLD infographic
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Asia will be right at the forefront, because large parts of the pandemic have already been overcome there, and China has been growing again for a long time.
The other emerging countries are benefiting from rising raw material prices and the recovery in world trade.
Ultimately, however, the weak US dollar and the low US interest rates also have an effect, because these countries usually borrow in dollars.
For the emerging markets, this leads to the attractive situation that interest rates for them are as low as seldom before.
On the other hand, they are of course still higher for western investors than in Germany or the USA.
Hence, they willingly give their money.
But that could prove short-sighted.
Relatively low national debt
Because in 2021, inflation should increase worldwide.
“In the emerging markets, inflationary pressure could rise faster than in the industrialized countries, among other things because of the higher weight of food in the shopping cart and relatively weak currencies,” says Michael Ott, an analyst at Commerzbank.
"At the same time, the central banks there have hardly any leeway for bond purchases as in the industrialized countries, since that would weaken the currencies considerably due to a lack of confidence."
The monetary authorities cannot artificially lower interest rates there.
The rising interest rates then slow down growth, which in turn affects public finances.
At first glance, these look quite stable, perhaps even more stable than those of the western industrialized countries.
Most of the emerging markets are still far less indebted, their total indebtedness rose by around 9.3 percentage points to 62.4 percent of economic output last year.
In the industrialized countries, however, it climbed by almost 20 percentage points to 124.1 percent.
Omotunde Lawal, who is responsible for emerging market bonds at Barings, sees few problems in the short term.
“When it comes to solvency, there are a number of countries that appear to be in pretty good shape - Mexico, for example, or Russia, Thailand and Peru appear to be solvent, as do emerging European countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, ”she says.
"It can only work if the private sector participates"
But being able to pay is one thing, wanting to pay is another.
“It is more complicated to analyze whether a country is ready to pay its debts,” says Lawal.
The influence of international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund also play a role here.
"In recent months, there have been signs that these institutions might encourage emerging economies with high debt-to-GDP ratios to reschedule," she says.
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Last year, for example, the G-20 countries announced a government debt moratorium for many emerging and developing countries, and this is very popular.
At the beginning of the week even Ethiopia, which has been one of the fastest growing and most successful emerging economies in recent years, asked for debt relief.
Above all, however, the World Bank is urging private creditors to participate in the moratorium and in debt rescheduling plans.
"It can only work if the private sector participates," said World Bank President David Malpass in mid-January.
But political developments can also quickly turn an apparently solvent emerging country into a bottomless pit, as the example of Venezuela shows.
30 years ago it was the richest country in South America, today it is de facto bankrupt and plagued by galloping inflation.
And even in the case of Saudi Arabia, the question is whether the country will be able to draw on resources as it does today in 30 or 40 years, when the bonds mature.
Who knows how much oil the world will then need, or whether it will need any at all.
It is even more questionable whether foreign investors and private individuals are so eager to move to a new city where the temperature is 50 degrees and more in summer.
In 40 years, “The Line” could have sunk into sandstorms long ago.
And with it the capital of investors from all over the world who have just bought Saudi government bonds.