The question of what constitutes an emerging market has haunted me for decades. Since 1989, the World Bank has defined an emerging market as a country with a GDP per capita ceiling of $13,000 or less. But gross domestic product is simply a “wealth” statistic. A country with $12,999 in GDP per capita is very different from one with $1,500.

Thus a new, multi-dimensional method of classifying emerging markets is called for, one that takes into account a cluster of different indicators to produce a ranking of countries’ socio-economic maturation.

Having traded in and taught about these countries for more than 20 years, I have witnessed immense progress among many emerging markets, but often this progress has not been fully appreciated by either the providers of financial indices or investors.