Picking apart the prospects for “frontier markets”

After a stellar run over the past decade or so, growth across “frontier markets” as a whole is likely to slow over the next couple of years. But the moderation in aggregate growth will mask important divergences between the fortunes for individual countries. The brunt of the slowdown is likely to be borne by commodity producing economies, such as Ghana and the Gulf countries. By contrast, the outlook for manufacturing-based frontier markets, such as Bangladesh, is brightening.