Argentina returns from the frontier

Index provider MSCI has said it will assess whether Argentina can be considered an emerging market again.

Andrew Van Sickle
By
published
in Features

Ever since Mauricio Macri became president in 2015, Argentina "has been finding its way back from the financial periphery", says The Economist. Macri has moved in a business-friendly direction, eliminating capital controls and finally reaching a deal with creditors who were stiffed when Argentina defaulted in 2001.

Now index provider MSCI has said it will assess whether Argentina can be considered an emerging market again. It was one of the ten original members of the emerging markets index in 1988. But seven years ago it was downgraded to a frontier market, a category for high-risk, politically unstable stockmarkets such as Morocco or Kazakhstan.

An upgrade would lure in capital from investors who wouldn't dare put their money in a frontier market. Funds with about $1.7trn of assets track the MSCI Emerging Markets index, notes Carolina Millan on Bloomberg.com, compared to just $26bn for the frontier index. Joining Brazil and Chile in the emerging-market category will be another milestone on Argentina's road back tonormality.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.

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