Six years ago, Liliana Rojas-Suarez, senior fellow and director of the Latin American Initiative, researched and published for the Center for Global Development (CGD) an interesting study of emerging markets’ resilience to external shocks. She compared their performance in 2007, before the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), and seven years later in 2014 covering 21 countries.

Clean and high-quality fuels are now made available in more provinces as Caltex, marketed by Chevron Philippines Inc. (CPI), recently opened new service stations...