The Geneva-based World Trade Organization estimates intra- emerging market trade rose on average by 18 percent per year from 2000 to 2008, faster than commerce between emerging and advanced nations. It totaled $2.8 trillion in 2008, about half of emerging-market trade with all nations.

That performance is especially welcome now given the sluggish recovery in the rich economies, said HSBC's King, author of "Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity" and a former U.K. Treasury official.

Chinese exports to the emerging world accounted for about
9.5 percent of gross domestic product in 2008, compared with 2 percent in 1985, he calculated. India's jumped to 7.3 percent from 1.5 percent and Brazil's almost doubled to 6.3 percent.

Emerging-market economies will grow 6.9 percent this year and 6.2 percent in 2011, King said, outpacing the 2.4 percent and 1.9 percent projected expansions of developed economies.

Providing Protection
"There are now massive trade connections within the emerging markets and they're becoming increasingly important," said King in a telephone interview. "It means in one sense the emerging world is protected from the worst ravages of the developed world."

Those ravages were born in the global recession of 2008-09 from which the advanced world is proving slow to recover, even after policy makers cut interest rates to record lows. That's prompting businesses and investors to seek other sources of growth.

Of the foreign direct investment flowing into south, east and southeast Asia alone, China was a source of 13.3 percent in 2008, compared with the U.S.'s 7.9 percent and up from 0.4 percent in 1991, according to a report last month from the Geneva-based United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

China, the world's fastest-growing major economy, dominates the push into fellow emerging markets, passing the U.S. as the biggest exporter to the Middle East in 2008.

Eoin Treacy's view The so-called emerging markets are rapidly carving out a greater portion of the global economy for themselves in what is becoming an increasingly multi-polar world. Growth both between and within these markets and the success many countries are having in raising their populations out of poverty is such that it is not much of an analytical leap to opine that this pattern has years, if not decades, to run. As investors we will have ample opportunity to profit.