In a recent round of conferences about the so-called emerging-market economies, I often found myself at odds with other analysts and had to keep making the same points repeatedly. To save time in the future, here they are:

1. The emerging economies are more different from one another than they are alike. China is bigger than Germany, France and Italy combined, even in current dollar terms. On the basis of new purchasing-power-parity estimates, China might already be as big as the U.S. South Korea is as rich as Portugal and not far behind Spain: It has plenty in common with those "advanced economies" and nothing in common with the "emerging markets" of Africa.

2. The mood of the markets is sometimes good for a laugh, but not much else. At one of the conferences, I was assigned this question: “Is this emerging-market crisis going to be as bad as 1998?” This was in March. For the year to date, with the important exceptions of the Chinese and Russian markets, virtually all emerging-market equity indexes are showing stronger gains than the U.S., many of them at double-digit rates.

David Fuller's view

Here is Jim O'Neill's column.

This is a very useful article from Jim O’Neill.  Views about the various stock markets can become entrenched.  However, emerging markets are constantly changing, mostly evolving and occasionally regressing.