Journal of Applied Mathematics and Decision Sciences
Volume 8 (2004), Issue 4, Pages 201-218
doi:10.1155/S1173912604000136

The relationship between stock markets of major developed countries and Asian emerging markets

Wing-Keung Wong,1 Jack Penm,2 Richard Deane Terrell,3 and Karen Yann Ching Lim1

1Department of Economics, National University of Singapore, Singapore
2Faculty of Economics and Commerce, Australian National University, Australia
3National Graduate School of Management, Australian National University, Australia

Copyright © 2004 Wing-Keung Wong et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

With the emergence of new capital markets and liberalization of stock markets in recent years, there has been an increase in investors' interest in international diversification. This is so because international diversification allows investors to have a larger basket of foreign securities to choose from as part of their portfolio assets, so as to enhance the reward-to-volatility ratio. This benefit would be limited if national equity markets tend to move together in the long run. This paper thus studies the issue of co-movement between stock markets in major developed countries and those in Asian emerging markets using the concept of cointegration. We find that there is co-movement between some of the developed and emerging markets, but some emerging markets do differ from the developed markets with which they share a long-run equilibrium relationship. Furthermore, it has been observed that there has been increasing interdependence between most of the developed and emerging markets since the 1987 Stock Market Crash. This interdependence intensified after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. With this phenomenon of increasing co-movement between developed and emerging stock markets, the benefits of international diversification become limited.