Emerging Markets, an influential website that provides news and analysis on economic policy among other things, on Saturday named South Africa’s Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan, as the Finance Minister of the Year (2013).

Emerging Markets attributed this award to Gordhan’s sensible fiscal policy in the face of South Africa’s “exposure” to the risks from the Federal Reserve’s pullback of quantitative easing.

“The prudent fiscal policy led by Pravin Gordhan, who became finance minister in 2009 at the height of the global economic crisis, has been praised by analysts,” according to the Emerging Markets’ citation.

Gordhan, speaking in his acceptance speech late last week in Washington DC, said South Africa, Nigeria and other emerging market economies hope to develop Africa into a bigger economy.

Gordhan said he was not happy with the fact that negative things were now being said about emerging markets’ economic growth, which until the end of the first half of this year received rave reviews for running their economies well.

“Three months later, we are apparently fragile and we are terrible managers of our economies,” Gordhan said in a statement.

“We the emerging markets are here to stay. We live in an interconnected world, and more importantly, we live in an interdependent world. There is no decoupling for from you, the advanced economies, and there is no decoupling from us, the emerging markets,” Gordhan continued in the statement.