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[Editor's note: A previous version of this article stated that the GDP-weighted indexes were launched by Barclays Global Investors. In fact, they were launched by Barclays Capital. A corrected version runs below.]
Barclays Capital 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.
Barclays isn’t the first to launch GDP-weighted bond indexes. Pimco debuted its own index in January of this year, and others (including the UN) have looked at this space. The advantages (or risks, depending on how you look at it) of a GDP-weighted index in the bond space are significant.
For starters, market-cap-weighted bond indexes assign larger and larger weights to countries that borrow more and more money. This is counterintuitive, 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. GDP-weighted indexes partially correct these imbalances.
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 emerging markets.
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