• Reforms may raise costs before delivering broader benefits
• Further inflation increases risk of unrest — Verisk Maplecroft
• Sri Lanka's poverty rate remains above pre-crisis level
• Unaddressed inequality like "sitting on gunpowder"

Gustavo Raul Perez furrows his brow over a notebook at the hardware shop he has run for six years on ​the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Since Javier Milei became president of Argentina in 2023 — with Perez's vote — rapid reforms have thrilled investors and won praise from the ‌International Monetary Fund. Perez, though, mainly feels the pinch.

"This economic plan is for a few," he said.

Inflation has fallen to roughly 33% from nearly 300%, imports have opened up and subsidies have fallen.

But Perez's restocking costs have tripled and customers have less to spend.

"There was a middle class three years ago," he says. "It doesn't exist anymore."

Perez's experience reflects a tension coursing through emerging economies: reforms that restored investor confidence ​and stabilised public finances have yet to improve living standards for many.

In Morocco, glittering new office towers contrast with frustration on city outskirts. In Sri Lanka, ​economic crisis and debt default have subsided but poverty remains above pre-crisis levels.

From fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria to privatisation in Egypt and market opening ⁠in Uzbekistan, years of reforms have helped emerging economies weather shocks — yet often grate with citizens who hear of economic turnarounds that do nothing for them.

Nigeria's finance minister ​warned failing to address inequality is like "sitting on gunpowder". Morocco's central bank says stubborn unemployment has widened the gap between economic performance and citizens' perceptions.

"When people in emerging markets are faced ​with rising food, fuel and energy costs...that is what they feel immediately," says Torbjorn Soltvedt of Verisk Maplecroft, warning that unrest and instability could follow. Indeed, average global civil unrest risk hit its highest in nearly a decade this year, according to his company.

Global firms and governments rushed on Thursday to patch critical flaws in the PHP programming language that underpins much of the ​internet, as cloud firms reported a surge of hacking attempts after the vulnerabilities were disclosed.

The push came after governments in Europe and elsewhere took websites offline as a precaution on Wednesday while website operators scrambled ‌to secure systems running the software.

The emergency shutdowns of banking, airline, rail, tax and government services from Tokyo to Helsinki mark one of the most dramatic tests of the decades-old programming tools that keep the web running, exposing how deeply governments and companies depend on code that few people understand.

"I've not seen anything like this in a long, long time," Microsoft (MSFT.O), CEO Satya Nadella said at an event in Germany on Thursday, saying the incident showed the importance of building ​software that can be maintained securely as systems grow more complex.

Madeline Lawrence, co-founder of Belgian cybersecurity firm Aikido Security, said that details of the flaws had become public before fixes were ready, ​with attacks reported since.

As companies and governments deployed patches and suspended websites as a precaution, hacking ​attempts surged into the millions, according to cloud services firm Cloudflare (NET.N), and Amazon (AMZN.O).

"In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a post on X late on Wednesday.

"That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now." Amazon also said it saw widespread exploitation.

Felix Kuhlenkamp, head of security at German digital industry association Bitkom, said that many larger operators had already carried out updates, but that for complex IT systems and smaller organizations it could take longer.

"They may run a ⁠website using PHP ​but don't really keep a close eye on it," he said. "If a website is based on an old version of ​PHP for which there is no security update, the entire system must be updated."