Emerging Markets

The term emerging markets typically refers to a distinctive financial asset class among international investors and financial firms and designates countries perceived as transitioning from developing to developed economies (often countries that were formerly part of the Third World or the communist bloc). The term emerging markets was coined in 1981 by Antoine van Agtmael, the then director of the Capital Markets Department of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector development arm of the World Bank Group, which created emerging markets as a financial asset class when it developed the first emerging market investment fund (the Korea Fund, in 1984) and provided the seed money for that fund. Between 1984 and 1994, the IFC underwrote and invested in more than 30 emerging market ...