The Federal Government has announced the listing of selected Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) Bonds in J.P. Morgan’s newly introduced Government Bond Index–Emerging Markets Edge (GBI-EM Edge), describing the development as a significant recognition of the country’s economic reforms and growing investor confidence.

According to the Federal Ministry of Finance, J.P. Morgan, manager of the world’s most widely tracked emerging market bond indices, disclosed the inclusion of selected FGN bonds in the new benchmark, which tracks local-currency government debt across frontier emerging markets.

The ministry said that Nigeria qualified for inclusion based on the liquidity of its domestic bond market and the size of its government bond issuances.

“Nigeria qualified on two key measures: liquidity, with FGN Bonds actively traded under a Two-Way Quote System, and issuance size, with outstanding volumes per tenor well above the USD 250 million minimum required for the GBI-EM Edge,” it said in a statement on Monday. “Nigeria’s weighting in the index is 7.40 per cent, among the highest of the 26 markets covered and close to J.P. Morgan’s eight per cent maximum country weighting.”

The Federal Government said the development reflects the impact of reforms aimed at stabilising the naira, clearing the foreign exchange backlog and improving broader economic indicators, including GDP growth and inflation.

The inclusion, it said, also marks Nigeria’s return to a J.P. Morgan benchmark for the first time in more than a decade, following its exit from the GBI-EM Global Diversified index in 2015 amid foreign exchange liquidity constraints which the current reform agenda has directly addressed.

FGN Bonds were first included in the GBI-EM in 2012.