The lack of development is reflected in the low weights for the region in the global market indexes which drive so much of the allocation of portfolio investment in the present world: Asia accounts for less than 4 per cent of the Morgan Stanley MSCI global equity index - the most widely used - and an even smaller share of global bond market indexes.
In both cases, the shares are very much lower than the region’s 25 per cent share in world GDP. Needless to say, the share of Australia’s outward portfolio investment going to Asia is also quite small, accounting for only 10.9 per cent of our portfolio investment in 2002.