Analyzing determinants of foreign credit demand for sovereign bonds*

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the economic determinants of foreign credit demand for sovereign bonds in selected emerging and advanced countries. Furthermore, it is an objective to understand what causes a greater impact on this demand: the country’s domestic macroeconomic fundamentals or the external global environment. To this end, using data on share of foreign demand for sovereign bonds, an econometric analysis will be conducted with panel data from 2004 to 2019 for 45 emerging and advanced markets. The main findings show that both domestic fundamentals and the external environment affect the foreign participation in sovereign debt, but results vary depending on the degree of development and the channel through each variable affect our dependent variable. We find that domestic fundamentals seem to be related with the increase in foreign participation for both group of economies, but with different magnitudes and interpretation. For some variables, it is more related to the foreign demand of sovereign bonds and, for others, associated with the bond supply. The degree of development also seems to be important to the external environment. For some variables (US nominal interest rate), the ’search for yield’ plays a major role for the bond demand. But, for others (as the FX volatility and the VIX Index), the global demand is related with foreign investors’ risk aversion. Finally, we found that, in times of global turmoil, domestic fundamentals matter less for foreign attractiveness than in times when the global volatility is low.