Equity domestic market capitalisation

In this note, we look at the domestic market capitalisation of exchanges during the Covid-19 pandemic compared with the previous year.

The overall domestic market capitalisation at the end of May 2021 was US 115.21 trillion. This figure is based on data from 82 exchanges worldwide. This represents a 42.95% increase compared to the end of May 2020 and a 1.45% increase compared to the end of April 2021.

Figures 1-4 show that at the end of March 2020 (when World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a pandemic), the domestic market capitalisation dropped significantly compared with the month before (by -13.98%) and with March 2019 (by -12.32%), but it recovered quickly to pre-pandemic times, in November 2020 surpassing the US$ 100 trillion for the first time (when positive news about vaccines emerged), ending the year at US$ 105.60 trillion. This pattern continued in 2021 (during the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines), with the exception of January 2021, when market capitalisation fell by 2.88% compared to December 2020, as Table 1 shows. This is the same situation observed at the end of January 2020, when the market capitalisation also fell compared to December 2019 (by -1.41%).

We observe noticeable increases in the first five months of 2021 in all regions compared to the same month in 2020 (as shown in Table 2) and compared to the same month in 2019 (as shown in Figures 1-4).

For quarter-on-quarter percentage change, we invite the reader to refer to Tables 3 and 4, where a comparison with the same quarter last year is shown and, respectively, the previous quarter.