The expected inclusion of China's A-shares into the world's second largest index company, the FTSE Russell Indexes, will bring about 100 billion yuan (about 14.5 billion U.S. dollars) to China, the Economic Information Daily reported on Tuesday.
FTSE Russell will announce its final decision on whether to include China's A-shares into its FTSE Global Equity Index Series on Thursday morning according to its schedule.
If included, the A-share market will be upgraded from unrated to the Secondary Emerging market segment, the third classification of the index following the Developed and Advanced Emerging market segments.
Insiders predicted that this time the A-shares would be successfully included in the index.
Dong Dengxin, head of the research institute on finance and securities in Wuhan University of Science & Technology, said the inclusion was well-reasoned due to the upcoming Shanghai-London Stock Connect and would benefit the stock markets of both sides.
Regarding the weights that will be included, FTSE Russell's CEO Mark Makepeace previously said publicly that the assigned weight of the A-shares might be higher than its competitor, the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI), by 0.8 percent in its emerging market index. The MSCI had included A-shares into its index in June.
Meanwhile, Makepeace predicted that in the short run, the incremental fund value brought about by the inclusion of the A-share market would be more or less equivalent to that by the MSCI, which was about 100 billion yuan.
As early as 2014, FTSE Russell announced that it would consider including China's A-shares into its index in a bid to offer access to its investors to allocate A-share assets.
In 2015, FTSE Russell provided a transition plan for this inclusion. However, the inclusion has failed over the past two years due to capital mobility and a clearing divergence.
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