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Trying to establish a clear definition of emerging markets is not unlike trying to determine what great design looks like, ask a dozen people and you’ll get a dozen different answers.
This is in part because there has never been a sufficient answer that satisfies the definition and sufficiently includes and equally so excludes different nations.
It would appear that something at first glance as obvious and simple as the G20 (Group of 20) an international forum that brings together the world’s 20 leading industrialised and emerging economies would be easy to define. The group accounts for 85 percent of world GDP and two-thirds of the global population. Its members nations are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union.
But hold on aren’t France, Germany and Italy in the EU. And at the time of writing the United Kingdom was trying to get out of the EU while Turkey was still trying to get in. So isn’t it the G16 or is it the G44 if one includes all the EU member states.
The challenge being that any geopolitical grouping of countries is always open to interpretation. The United Nations recognises 54 African countries, the African Union recognises 52. The disputed two countries being Western Sahara and Somaliland.
And then sometimes terms seep into the global lexicon and mean something that they were not initially meant to. A case in point during the cold war in the 1960’s many countries came to be classified as 1st world, 2nd world or 3rd world. The 1st world was defined as NATO aligned countries including most Western European countries, the Canadians, and the North Americans. The 2nd world were those countries aligned to the former Soviet Union including China & Cuba.
The 3rd world was in effect everyone else, mostly countries that wanted to be deemed neutral or were not sufficient militarised to be given any serious consideration.
The list included countries such as Mali, Indonesia and most other countries deemed economically underdeveloped. But it also included neutral countries like Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland who wanted their non aligned status maintained. Ask anyone today, specifically the Swiss if would they consider themselves a 3rd world country and your likely to met with a range of colour metaphors, but technically as per the original classification Switzerland remains a 3rd world country.
The point is not to classify the Swiss, the Irish or the Swedes as anything other than developed and in most cases progressive. Thus one is compelled to rebut the over simplified, temporal, unchallenged and often baseless classifications that are imposed upon countries by the fund managers, military organisations and the media to package complex geopolitical issues into soundbites and five hundred word columns like this one…… Sorry Switzerland!