Cris Sholto Heaton’s recent article on investing in the small Asian countries outside China and India brings a welcome change to the usual run-of-the-mill emerging markets coverage.

You can read the whole story here.

I’ve long been a big proponent of investing in so-called Asian frontier countries. As Cris points out, “These smaller countries complement China and India. They should benefit from the rise of their larger neighbors and the region as a whole, while offering exposure to different themes and sectors.”

In fact, when I talked to Franklin Templeton’s outgoing emerging market fund manager Mark Mobius earlier this year, he was in the process of putting more of his own personal money into these miniature high-growth markets (you can read that story here, but you’ll need to have access to Index Publications’ subscription-only monthly ETFR publication).

Cris highlights

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Guest post by Manuel Alvarez-Rivera, Puerto Rico, Election Resources on the InternetVoters in the Kingdom of Thailand went to the polls on Sunday, December 23, 2007 in the first parliamentary election held since the September 2006 military coup that overthrew the elected but increasingly authoritarian and allegedly corrupt government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.Thailand's legislature, the National Assembly is composed of the Senate and the House of Representatives; the latter has 480 members, of which 400 are elected in 157 two- or three-seat constituencies, while the remaining eighty seats are filled in eight electoral regions by party-list proportional representation.Since a 1932 revolution brought an end to eight hundred years of absolute monarchy, Thailand has suffered numerous coups, and the country has alternated between intervals of at least nominal democratic governance and periods of military rule.The democratic interludes were often characterized by ...