Can someone recommend a good source of economic information and
investment information about Russia, emerging markets, and comparative
investment cases for Brazil, Russia, China, and India.  I do marketing
for an asset management firm which invests in Russia, and I need good
data to support the case for investing in Russia.  A friend has
recommended factiva.com.  I need both ideas and graphical data,
because I need to create sales presentations for our funds.

Factiva is good for current articles, however, a great source for the
information you are looking for is www.eiu.com  Economist Intelligence
Unit.  They offer pay as you go access to 200 countries - covering in
depth political and economic analysis and forecasts.

I would divide this into free sources and paid sources

Free Sources

1) International Financial Statistics (IFS) of the IMF - Economic
information from all of the world's central banks is accessible here.
You can get a free trial subscription for about a month.
The link: http://ifs.apdi.net/imf/logon.aspx

2) The IMF also has a number of freely available reports on global
financial markets, both emerging and mature. You could access these
from the following link:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/res/index.htm

3) The original BRIC Report is itself available from the Goldman Sachs
website. Link:
http://www.gs.com/insight/research/reports/report6.html
You can download the report from the top right-hand corner of the page.

4) The World Bank is a treasure trove of research reports, working
papers, and the like, most of which are freely available. See the
following link, for example:
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTWDRS/0,,contentMDK:20227703~pagePK:478093~piPK:477627~theSitePK:477624,00.html

See also the World Development Report 2005: A Better Investment
Climate For Everyone:
http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTWDRS/EXTWDR2005/0,,contentMDK:20259914~menuPK:477673~pagePK:64167689~piPK:64167673~theSitePK:477665,00.html

5) The Asian Development Bank, in association with the World Bank has
brought out reports called Investment Climate and Productivity Study
on the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Laos. All are freely
available. Link:
http://www.adb.org/Statistics/ics/default.asp

Paid Sources

1) I would say a better source than Factiva is LexisNexis. In addition
to news articles, you can also get access to research reports from a
number of research houses, including Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)
reports.

2) Should you have access to a terminal from Bloomberg, Reuters or
Datastream, you could get a wealth of statistical information on
emerging market countries.

Hope you find this useful.

Regards, 

Mitanni-ga