“As we are?.?.?.?prisoners of the words we pick, we had better pick them well,” said Giovanni Sartori, the Italian political scientist. For a long time since they were first coined in the 1980s, the words “emerging markets” appeared to have been well-chosen, such was their popularity as a description for a big chunk of the planet. As the world evolves, the term is progressively losing its purchase over the collective consciousness because it imprisons perceptions within parameters that are increasingly false or unhelpful.
For one thing, several “emerging markets” — particularly recession-hit Brazil and Russia — are no longer emerging in an economic sense but rather regressing at a rapid clip. For another, the sense of equivalence that the term bestows on the countries under its umbrella is entirely bogus. Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan all boast a gross domestic product per capita that is higher than that of the UK, but find themselves occupying the same definitional space as India, the Philippines and Indonesia.
Most of all though, the longstanding hierarchy that put “emerging markets” at the periphery and “developed markets” at the core of global affairs may be unravelling. In purchasing power parity terms, developed countries contribute less to global output than their emerging counterparts, after their share of world GDP dwindled to 43 per cent in 2014 from 54 per cent in 2004.