Argentina Wins Upgrade to Emerging Status After Nine Years

Argentina won promotion to emerging-market status for the first time in almost a decade, rewarding President Mauricio Macri for his efforts to scrap capital controls and normalize the economy after taking over in 2015 following years of mismanagement.

The decision by MSCI Inc., which dropped Argentina to frontier status in 2009, may set the stage for a 20 percent gain in the benchmark equity index, Morgan Stanley says, after a peso rout created one of the world’s worst-performing stock markets in dollar terms. MSCI delayed a decision last year, saying it needed more time to assess the "irreversibility" of Macri’s changes.