Barely a day goes by without a new craze for so-called frontier markets in Africa being mentioned somewhere. But are the returns worth the fuss?
As a whole, stock markets in sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa have lost slightly less than the 13% the S&P 500 lost in the first eight months of 2008. But even this year markets that are more developed might have made a better investment given that it is so much easier to get money out of them.
The Johannesburg Stock Exchange, for example, which is more than five times...
