Index Kingmakers Tackle Blurred Lines of Emerging Markets

Decades of graduations, demotions, rallies and retreats have left the world’s $12.5 trillion of emerging-market debt and equities facing a bit of an identity crisis. Nations as dissimilar as Pakistan, Greece, South Korea and Chile are considered members of the asset class, according to MSCI Inc. Declining inflation rates and receding currency risks have even got some banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. saying the lines have blurred with developed nations. The problem is that the signposts are so scattered, said Sonja Gibbs, a senior director at the Institute of International Finance, a trade group created during the international debt crisis of the early 1980s.