Guest post by Joseph Joyce

Unlike the global financial crisis of 2008-09, the current disruption in the financial markets of emerging market nations was anticipated. The “taper tantrum” of 2013 revealed the precarious position of many of these nations, particularly those dependent on commodity exports. The combination of a slowdown in Chinese growth, collapsing stock prices and a change in the Chinese central bank’s exchange rate policy indicated that the world’s second-largest economy has its own set of problems. But global volatility itself can roil financial markets, and good fundamentals may be of little help for a government trying to shelter its economy from the instability in world markets.

The importance of global (or “push”) factors for capital flows to emerging markets was studied by Eugenio Cerutti, Stijn Claessens and Damien Puy of the IMF. They looked at capital flows to 34 emerging markets during the period of 2001-2013, and found that global factors such as the VIX, a measure of anticipated volatility in the U.S. stock market, accounted for much of the variation in flows. Not all forms of capital were equally affected: bank-related and portfolio flows (bonds and equity) were strongly influenced by the global factors, but foreign direct investment was not.

Cerutti, Claessens and Puy also investigated whether the emerging markets could insulate themselves from the global environment with good domestic macro fundamentals. They reported that the sensitivity of emerging markets to the external factors depended in large part upon the identity of a country’s investors. The presence of global investors, such as international mutual funds in the case of portfolio flows and global banks in the case of bank finance, drove up the response to the global environment. The authors concluded: “…there is no robust evidence that “good” macroeconomic (e.g., public debt, growth) or institutional fundamentals (e.g., Investment Climate and Rule of Law) have a role in explaining EM different sensitivities to global push factors.”