Barclays Global Investors has launched a new family of gross-domestic-product-weighted bond indexes, as investors look for better ways to benchmark the global fixed-income universe.
BGI isn’t the first to launch GDP-weighted bond indexes. Pimco debuted its own index in January 2009, and others are looking at this space for a number of reasons.
For starters, market-cap-weighted bond indexes assign larger and larger weights to countries that borrow more and more money. This is counter-intuitive, as increased debt may raise the likelihood of default. In addition, market-cap-weighted bond indexes typically underweight emerging markets, which have less developed bond markets. Barclays notes that 22 emerging market countries account for just 15 percent of global GDP, but form less than 0.7 percent of the Barclays Global Aggregate Bond Index by market value.
Barclays’ new GDP-weighted index family includes the following flagship products:
- Global Aggregate GDP Weighted Index
- Global Treasury GDP Weighted Index
- Global Treasury Universal Index
In each variation, the methodology leads to a significant underweight in Japan and a correspondingly higher allocation to countries like the BRICs, Mexico, Taiwan and other emerging markets.
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