While challenges remain for EM debt, technicals, in some cases, have caused market prices to overshoot their fundamental value to the downside—creating opportunities for active, bottom-up managers.
This paper provides an update on performance and drivers for the sovereign emerging market debt (EMD) asset class this year. The final sections lay out the main improvements and strengths that we believe will allow EMD to navigate these troubled times, proving the asset class’s resilience again. These include improving balance of payments due to high commodity prices, decisive central bank policy, robust growth outlooks and better managed debt stocks.
Just as the world economy was recovering from COVID-19, 2022 brought fresh challenges. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, higher energy prices, food shortages and protectionist tensions all weigh on emerging-market (EM) growth. As a result, the IMF lowered its EM growth outlook for 2022 from +4.8% in January to +3.8% in April.