Equity Market Development Programme: We’ve built the field, now will the players come?

IN THE 1989 fantasy movie Field of Dreams, Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner) clears his cornfield to build a baseball diamond after hearing a voice promise: “If you build it, he will come.”

Kinsella risks financial ruin and ridicule, banking on a vision that a famous player of the past will return. (Spoiler: Many ghosts did come, including Kinsella’s long-departed father. They reconcile, making for a typical happy Hollywood ending.)

In a similar vein, regulators here are clearing the weeds and building new infrastructure through the Equity Market Development Programme (EQDP). They have streamlined listing requirements, removed the watchlist, provided grants for research and to help smaller companies improve their investor relations, given billions to fund managers, and most recently, established a dual listing framework with Nasdaq.