Exploring emerging markets debt: Bond voyage?

Abstract

We examine the characteristics, returns, and risks of local-currency, hard-currency, inflation-linked, and corporate emerging markets bonds over the period 2003 to 2025. The local-currency market has grown tremendously and with USD 7 trillion is now quadruple the size of the hard-currency market, which has grown to include more than 70 government issuers. Local-currency markets have more diversification potential with conventional asset classes, because of the currency risk involved. Hard-currency emerging debt markets have had higher return correlations with conventional credit asset classes but provide fundamental issuer diversification. The added value of emerging debt in multi-asset portfolios has been substantially larger in the first decade of our sample than in the most recent decade. This is at least partially driven by more attractive valuation levels today than a decade ago.

Keywords: Bonds, Debt, Fixed income, Emerging markets, Investing