Are BRICs an Asset Class...Do They Have Anything in Common ?

I have argued many times that BRICs (Brazil,Russia, India, China) is not a useful asset class for investment allocations due to the great diversity in their economies. I have argued the same for Emerging Markets overall as Latin American countries and Russia have little in coming with Emerging Asia particularly the largest countries in that group: India and China.

I cam across this first chart on growth forecasts from the IMF..as they say pictures speak louder than words.

Interestingly Emerging Asia has significantly outperformed the overall emerging markets index since 2011 (second graph below)