External balance sheets of emerging economies: low-yielding assets, high-yielding liabilities

The new millennium has witnessed a rapid expansion of external balance sheets and significant changes in the capital, currency and sectoral compositions of foreign assets and liabilities of emerging economies. These have created new channels of transmission of global financial shocks and amplified the susceptibility of the value of their outstanding stocks of gross foreign assets and liabilities to global financial conditions, leading to sizeable wealth transfers between emerging and advanced economies. They have also resulted in significant income transfers in view of negative yield differentials between their gross external assets and liabilities. Altogether, such transfers to advanced economies are estimated to have reached 2.3 per cent of the combined GDP of the G20 emerging economies per annum during 2000–2016.