While an anti-incumbent wave may be gaining momentum around the world, not all governments will face rejection just because growth disappoints, Gordhan said.
“Governments have different levels of legitimacy and connectivity with their population,” he said, citing as examples the current leadership in South Africa and Brazil, both of which have dramatically reduced poverty during the past decade. The South African government’s original 2.7 percent growth forecast for 2013 is unlikely to be met, he added.
In India -- swept by anti-corruption protests in 2011 -- Singh unveiled a program of food subsidies for the poor after growth slowed in the first quarter to the weakest since 2003.
Financial Strains
The $21 billion-a-year effort adds to fiscal strains after the rupee touched a record low July 8, making it harder for the government, which is gearing up for elections next year, to boost infrastructure spending while cutting a deficit almost twice that of Greece as a share of GDP, according to IMF data.
China’s slowdown is being domestically engineered, as the government attempts to rein in speculative lending and real- estate prices. If the clean-up fails, jobs will be lost, adding to social tensions that are increasingly apparent online where dissent is widespread, said Nomura’s Newton.
The number of so-called mass incidents -- strikes, riots, protests and other disturbances to social order -- doubled to 180,000 a year in 2010 from 2006 levels, Tsinghua University sociologist Sun Liping wrote in 2010. The government no longer makes such figures public.
“What nobody knows is what it takes to get people tapping away on cyber space to go out on streets,” he said.
Other emerging markets should also be on the alert.
“When people are disappointed, they go to the streets,” said Michael Shaoul, chairman and chief executive officer in New York of Marketfield Asset Management, which oversees more than $11 billion. “They haven’t given that up just because they’ve had a good decade.”