Should Africa’s emerging markets still be considered as a separate asset class?

This article examines the correlation of Africa’s emerging markets regionally and globally using the Continuous Morlet Wavelet (CMW) transform. The superiority of this technique is that it is able to estimate correlation in a time-varying manner and derive all information about structural changes in the data through a phase difference technique. We find that Africa’s emerging equity markets are partially segmented regionally and globally. Although correlations may have increased over time, we suggest that emerging markets in Africa should still be considered as a separate asset class.