Renata Trinca Colonel

How do emerging markets differ from developed markets? A conceptual and empirical analysis

the study of emerging markets (ems) is one of the most popular themes in international business research, at least in terms of the rise in published academic studies and those presented at conferences worldwide. despite the substantial increase in academic interest in ems, there is an alarming lack of consensus about what characterizes these markets as ‘emerging’. an important part of management theory is being built without an accurate revision of some of its key assumptions. implicitly the ‘emergingness’ is defined as the probability of the country achieving higher than average growth in the creation of economic wealth by including or attracting more resources or by using more efficiently existing factors of production. it appears that we academics view all countries that are not ‘developed’ as emerging—a problem that arises from the notable lack of a common definition of the term. We seem to be furiously investigating a phenomenon without really establishing its meaningful boundaries. our study redresses this crucial neglect by testing the correspondence between existing definitions of ems and countries that academics and practitioners deem to be ‘emerging’ markets. but who are these ems? and what differentiates them from markets that are not ‘emerging’? these are important questions to the extent that defining the boundaries of a phenomenon enables a shared understanding of the nature of the phenomenon itself. Without such consensus, even the most wellintended scientific endeavours devolve into studies of the ‘blind men and the elephant’ (a parable) variety in which different researchers ascribe very different meanings—with very different implications—to the same phenomenon (merchant & ford, 2011). yet, a closer scrutiny of em studies indicates a general reticence to define what the term ‘emerging markets’ actually means (Wilson & Ushakov, 2011)—and therefore who these markets really are, and what fundamentally characterizes them. While scholars have offered several working definitions of ems, there is no consensus about which, if any, of them most fully captures the essence