David Prosser: Apple owes it to investors to tell them more about the boss's health

Outlook In theory, it is the business of no one other than his nearest and dearest why exactly Steve Jobs has had to take a second leave of absence from Apple – or what his prognosis now is. In practice, Apple investors will want more information than the skimpy announcement that the technology giant yesterday offered. If it refuses to provide an update, Apple is not being fair to its shareholders.

It is difficult to think of any other company that comes close to Apple in the way in which Mr Jobs is an embodiment of the company. With the US markets closed for the Martin Luther King holiday yesterday, we don't yet know how investors will react to this announcement, though the 8 per cent sell-off of Apple's shares in Frankfurt, where the company has a secondary listing, offers a clue to the likely reaction. So too does the fact that last time Mr Jobs said he was taking time out for health reasons, trading in Apple shares had to be suspended following a 10 per cent plunge.

Apple, now the second-largest company in the world, has a market capitalisation of about $300bn. Last year, Barron's, the influential US financial newspaper, calculated that Mr Jobs himself accounted for $25bn of that value: on this basis the German reaction yesterday was an accurate assessment of the impact of Mr Jobs's absence rather than market hysteria.

Apple publishes its latest results today and will come under huge pressure to say more about Mr Jobs's condition. Elsewhere, that pressure might be considered prurient, but this is a company that has repeatedly refused toprovide shareholders with any information on succession planning. It is advising shareholders to vote against a proposal to be put to its next AGM that would require it publish a succession planning policy.

Let's hope Mr Jobs returns to work, fighting fit, as soon as possible. In the meantime, however, Apple must be more open. Having been happy for the company's stock to rise ever higher on the myth of Mr Jobs's omnipotence, it cannot dismiss all inquiries about his health as an invasion of privacy.

When do emerging nations emerge?

It was Antoine van Agtmael of the World Bank who in the 1980s coined the phrase "emerging markets", because he felt the term "third world" was pejorative – and that, in any case, it did not capture the economic progress being made by many countries, or the opportunities that progress offered.

Three decades later, Jim O'Neill, the chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, says Mr van Agtmael's linguistic invention is past its sell-by date – that the range of countries qualifying for "emerging market" status is now so disparate that the term has become meaningless.

Mr O'Neill knows a thing or two about such matters. He is the man who came up with "Bric", the shorthand for the growth markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China. These markets are emerging in the traditional sense, but make such major contributions to the global economy that it hardly seems appropriate to group them with some of the tiny economies that also come under the same term.

Now Mr O'Neill wants to expand the nations that have Bric status, adding Mexico, South Korea, Turkey and Indonesia. Having failed to come up with a suitably clever acronym, he's dubbing the new group "growth markets". The term may not catch on, but the more important point he makes is that any country whose economy accounts for more than 1 per cent of global GDP and which is still growing, ought not to be described as an emerging market.

Goldman's man is not the first to try to bridge the gap between emerging and emerged. Some economists now use the phrase "newly industrialised countries" to describe those economies that might not be considered first world but are nonetheless very large and still growing. The term "big emerging market" has also been used.

Why does it matter how we describe economies and countries? Well, apart from the fact that many in China and India, for example, feel patronised when the West describes them as emerging markets, grouping countries together in this way represents a failure to see that the world has changed.

It's the sort of lazy thinking that sees, for instance, British firms miss out on opportunities in huge new export markets, or authorities such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund cling to outdated governance practices that give Western countries influence that is now out of all proportion to their economic significance.

Cutting off your noseto spite your face

Nicolas Sarkozy spoke for many last week when he insisted that indebted Ireland could not expect to count on financial support from the rest of the European Unionforever if it insists on maintaining its corporation tax rate at 12.5 per cent. It's a perfectly rational reaction to the events of the past few months: bad enough for French taxpayers to have to stump up to rescue Ireland, but even worse that they must do so while watching it poach jobs and tax revenues with its cut-price rates of duty.

It is, however, the wrong reaction – assuming the French want their money back sooner rather than later. Note the $500m investment in Intel's County Kildare technology campus, announced by the American company over the weekend. Intel's man on the ground in Ireland made it clear that the investment could easily have gone elsewhere had Ireland given up its low tax rate as part of the bail-out agreement.

If the Irish economy is to get back on its feet – and start repaying the support it has had – it needs to continue attracting this sort of inward investment. Depriving it of one of its most crucial ways of doing so might play well in France and elsewhere, but it would be utterly self-defeating.