Emerging markets are nations with social or business activity in the process of rapid growth and industrialization. Based on data from 2006, there are around 28 emerging markets in the world^{[citation needed]} (data from 2010 says there are 40 emerging markets^{[citation needed]}). The economies of China and India are considered to be the largest. According to The Economist many people find the term outdated, but no new term has yet to gain much traction. Emerging market hedge fund capital reached a record new level in the first quarter of 2011 of $121 billion. The eight largest emerging and developing economies by either nominal GDP or GDP (PPP) are China, Brazil, Russia, India, Mexico, South Korea, Indonesia, and Turkey.

The ASEAN–China Free Trade Area, launched on January 1, 2010, is the largest regional emerging market in the world.

In the 1970s, "less economically developed countries" (LEDCs) was the common term for markets that were less "developed" (by objective or subjective measures) than the developed countries such as the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. These markets were supposed to provide greater potential for profit, but also more risk from various factors. This term was felt by some to be not positive enough so the emerging market label was born. This term is misleading in that there is no guarantee that a country will move from "less developed" to "more developed"; although that is the general trend in the world, countries can also move from "more developed" to "less developed".

Dr. Dambisa Moyo is an international economist and New York Times best-selling author of both Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way For Africa, published in 2009, and How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly - And the Stark Choices that Lie Ahead, published in 2011. Moyo's 3rd book Winner Take All: China's Race for Resources and What It Means for the World will be published in June 2012.

Moyo was born and raised in Lusaka, Zambia. She holds a Doctorate (PhD) in Economics from St Antony's College, Oxford University; her 2002 dissertation is titled "Essays on the determinants of the components of savings in developing countries". In 1997, Moyo earned a Master of Public Administration (MPA) from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She also earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA) in Finance and Bachelor of Science (BS) in Chemistry from American University in Washington D.C. She worked for the World Bank as a Consultant and at Goldman Sachs where she worked in the debt capital markets and as an economist in the global macroeconomics team.

William Russell Easterly (born September 7, 1957) is an American economist, specializing in economic growth and foreign aid. He is a Professor of Economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and Co-Director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. Easterly is an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth, and of the Journal of Development Economics.

Easterly maintained a blog called "Aid Watch" where he posted regularly about aid related issues.

He has also spoken at the Templeton Foundation with his contemporary Dambisa Moyo as well as written in the press to respond to critics such as Jeffrey Sachs and Ha-Joon Chang.

Born in West Virginia and raised in Bowling Green, Ohio, Easterly received his BA from Bowling Green State University in 1979 and his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1985. He spent sixteen years as a Research Economist at the World Bank and was adjunct professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

Gar Alperovitz (born May 5, 1936) is Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, College Park Department of Government and Politics. He is a former Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; a founding Fellow of Harvard’s Institute of Politics; a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution. Alperovitz also served as a Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and as a Special Assistant in the Department of State. Alperovitz is a founding principal of The Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland, and a member of the board of directors for the New Economics Institute.

Alperovitz is a political economist and revisionist historian whose numerous articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Nation, and The Atlantic among other publications. Alperovitz has been profiled by The New York Times, the Associated Press, People, UPI, and Mother Jones and has been a guest on numerous network TV and cable news programs, including Meet the Press, Larry King Live, The Charlie Rose Show, Crossfire, and The O'Reilly Factor.