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Five stylised facts about EM and commodities
The Emerging View
25 April 2018
Data no longer supports the conventional thesis of Emerging Markets (EM) as a pure commodity play. EM countries typically fall into either heavily specialist commodity producers or non-specialists, which each have dramatically different exposures to commodities. Besides, commodity imports offset two-thirds of EM commodity exports, which means that the economic exposure to commodities is much smaller than gross commodity exports imply. This begs the question why EM growth rates and sovereign spreads are still so positively correlated with commodity prices.