China Lone BRIC Among Top Emerging Markets With Thailand No. 2

When Antoine van Agtmael was traveling around Asia in the late 1970s, he became convinced there were companies worth investing in throughout the developing region. In 1981, while working for the World Bank’s International Finance Corp., he presented an idea for a “third-world equity fund” to Salomon Brothers Inc.

“They told me we would never sell this fund,” van Agtmael says, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its March issue. “They wanted a more-uplifting name. That’s how we came up with the term emerging.”