Frontier recovery remains on track

Frontier financial markets have endured a torrid 2018, but this hasn’t been accompanied by a deterioration in the hard activity data. Admittedly, growth in the largest frontier economy, Nigeria, slowed in Q2. But that was due to weakness in the oil sector; the non-oil sector actually strengthened. Meanwhile, a raft of second quarter figures from other large frontier economies including Vietnam and Ukraine, showed that growth strengthened. And we expect a similar trend in the remaining Q2 data to be released over the next few weeks. All told, on our measure of aggregate frontier market GDP, we expect growth of around 3.7% in 2018, up from a four-year high of 3.4% in 2017.