Coronavirus leads to EM of two paces
The performance gap between East Asia and other emerging markets has never been greater than in the first five months of 2020. At first sight, the cause looks obvious: coronavirus. But in the background there is a different dynamic at play.
Ironically, the ranking of best-performing stock markets in 2020 is led by China, the country where the pandemic originated. Korea and Taiwan are also well on their way, and in any case doing much better than most other emerging markets (see graph below).