While they prefer to remain under the radar, the rapid proliferation of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) over the past decade has attracted a great deal of attention, with their number effectively doubling and assets under management currently standing at an estimated $5000bn to $6000bn. This growth is showing no sign of slowing, with US fund manager Invesco forecasting that global SWF assets could continue to grow to between $12,000bn and $15,000bn by 2017.
Roughly half of existing SWFs belong to non-commodity production countries, such as China and France, but, in the past couple of years, the majority of the new funds have come from resource-rich regions such as Africa and Latin America. According to a report published by JPMorgan Asset Management in June 2013, Africa has been witnessing the most rapid establishment of new SWFs, driven mainly by the amassing of commodity revenues and foreign exchange reserves.
