The Russian finance ministry reported its preliminary estimate of the federal budget deficit for 2020 at RUB4.1tr, or 3.8% GDP, which is smaller than the RUB4.6tr (4.2% of GDP) deficit we anticipated due to better-than-expected revenue collection and...

The Bank of Russia released its first estimateof the foreign debt as of year-end 2020, which gives additional cover to the general balance of payments data we covered earlier. In 2020, the composition of the net private capital outflow from Russia ch...

The pandemic winners among developed market stocks, almost all tech firms, are now household names, with the likes of Zoom helping to transform our working and personal lives and Tesla becoming a retail-investor favourite, recording staggering share...

Russia's current account surplus totalled US$32.5bn in 2020 (including US$5.5bn in 4Q20), which is US$4.5bn lower than we expected and half the 2019 surplus of US$64.8bn. The balance of cross-border salary and investment income has also improved sign...

Jumia is known as the Amazon of Africa. Sea’s exponential rise has made it the largest company in ASEAN, a region of 600mn people. We identified Fawry as an EM tech stock to watch in July 2020, when the pre-unicorn company had a market cap of US$735m...

Russia's central bank will buy $1.4bn of FX on the local market this month as a part of a budget rule, which is a material change from the $1.9bn of sales seen last month (Figure 1). On a side-note, the return of FX purchases should be positive for R...