An Empirical Examination of International Diversification Benefits in Central European Emerging Equity Markets‪.‬

I. INTRODUCTION International portfolio diversification was started in with the decision of Morgan Guaranty in 1974 to invest a part of its pension fund outside the United-States. At that time, the US market lived two successive decreases in 1973 and 1974, but outside the United-States, the returns had been very attractive. Accordingly, the investors have become increasingly more active in foreign capital markets. The investment in international financial market knows a spectacular increase. Recently, as a consequence of market liberalisation, financial markets tended to become more integrated. This integration process implies the increase of correlation between financial markets which can have negative effects on benefits from international diversification. This later depends on markets correlations. If the correlation coefficients between markets are higher, the gains from international diversification are low. On the other hand, if the market correlation is low the gain is very important.