“Growth Followed by a Pandemic: Patterns in Fourteen Major Stock Exchanges, from 2012 to 2021”

Abstract

This paper analyzes fourteen major global exchanges during the period 2012 to 2021 in order to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on previous growth as well as to ascertain the nature of changes in proportion of regional and size-based categories. The primary audience for this analysis are investors in mutual funds or index funds. Drawing on publicly available information from Yahoo! Finance and research in financial news, a variety of conclusions were drawn regarding the above question. Although generally the fourteen chosen stock indexes grew during 2012 to 2020 and shrank in 2021, certain indexes appeared more resilient than others, namely the Nikkei and Nasdaq indices, in weathering the impacts of the COVID-19 recession. Other indexes, such as the Johannesburg and the Swiss, saw their relatively large pre-COVID gains more than wiped out during 2021. Finally, several formerly leading regional exchanges, such as the Hong Kong Hang Seng, lost their formerly dominant regional position. Although COVID-19 caused great havoc in the markets, it appears that some of the relative “winners” of the pandemic might have been the result of strong external factors only partially related to their country’s overall handling of the pandemic.