A Puzzle of Emerging Markets: A Systemic ‘Surprisingability’

Since the early 1980s when the term ‘emerging markets’ was first coined by the IMF and World Bank to describe the performance in countries with changing institutional framework, the theory has failed to produce a coherent and systemic theory. Overtime the term became generic, initially including developing countries (mainly in Asia and Latin America), but later covering the former socialist countries/economies (labelled as transitional countries), and some ‘developed’ countries that did not have extensive experience of capital market development (mainly due to having a bank‐based financial system).