Emerging Markets: Where the Next Decade of Growth Lives

For most of the last decade, the fastest-growing economies have been outside the G7. Demographics, urbanisation and infrastructure investment are concentrated in regions that most Western portfolios barely touch. The result is a structural mismatch between where growth happens and where capital sits.

Emerging-market risk is real — governance, liquidity and currency volatility all matter — which is why structure becomes everything. Co-investing alongside vetted local sponsors, demanding clean ownership documentation, and holding capital in escrow until milestones are met are not optional safeguards. They are the difference between an allocation and a gamble.

The principle in this article applies everywhere, but the numbers do not. Cross-border investors face an additional set of variables — source-country withholding tax, treaty access, capital-gains treatment by residency, reporting obligations under CRS and FATCA, and the impact of holding structures on net IRR. Two investors taking identical positions can end up with materially different post-tax outcomes purely because of where they are resident and how they hold the asset.

Before committing to any cross-border deal, map the tax stack: corporate tax already paid at the asset level, withholding tax on outbound distributions (and whether a treaty reduces it), and personal or corporate tax in your residency. On Aqmār, the SPV jurisdiction, operating-asset jurisdiction, and standard distribution mechanics are disclosed in the deal pack so your tax adviser can model the post-tax return rather than reconstructing it from emails after the fact.