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History is being rewritten. The western triumphalists who reaped the spoils of empire and post-World War hegemony could for the first time be surpassed by an Asian country.

Monolithic China, home to the world's largest population, powerhouse economy and burgeoning military is expected to overtake the United States on GDP terms by growth by 2020. MSCI Emerging Markets has staggeringly outperformed the MSCI World index over three, five and 10 years by as much as 10.9 percentage points.

If the decoupling theme is proven, investors may soon start asking why Bric countries are not constituents of the most common benchmark for Global Growth, the MSCI World index. Launched in 1969, the index has only admitted six countries to its original 17, and the United States remains by far the largest weighting - from 69 per cent at inception to 50 per cent today. The second-largest weightings belong to the UK and Japan (both 10 per cent), followed by France and Canada (both 5 per cent), followed by Germany and Switzerland (both 4 per cent).

Dimitris Melas, executive director of MSCI Barra, says the weighting of the indices is determined by the free float market capitalisation of each country and explains there is an ongoing analytical process to determine which countries should be categorized as developed, emerging markets or frontier.

He says: "We have a very clear, transparent framework for classification. MSCI are the predominant indices used by investors around the world so that suggests it has been accepted by the majority of investors."

Robin Geffen, chief investment officer of Neptune Investment Management says that while the World indexreflects the current composition of global market capitalisation, it does not accurately reflect existing global growth opportunities in fast-growing emerging economies.

He says: "Our economics department forecasts that when each global economy is growing at its trend rate, the Bric economies represent approximately one third of global GDP growth. However, during a developed market downturn, this figure can be much higher. Indeed the IMF forecast that in 2009 emerging markets will be responsible for 80 per cent of global growth. We believe that any fund that aims to represent the current global growth profile needs to give much greater representation to emerging markets than is present in the traditional global equity indices."

Perhaps necessarily the classification of countries as "developed" or "developing" is a grey area with countries under constant review and different measures having different connotations. Mark Hammond, investment director of global equities at Fidelity International says: "I would agree that the boundaries are less distinct and indeed some index providers are recognising this fact. The FTSE recently announced that Israel will no longer be categorised as emerging, the MSCI is looking at this issue in relation to Israel, Korea and some other countries and is conducting discussions with various fund mangers and other clients. They have been concerned about geopolitical risks associated with Israel and Korea, despite these two having reached fairly developed levels by other yardsticks, such as GDP per capita."

However, he says, investors should not be unduly worried about risk/reward transparency in Global funds benchmarking to the MSCI World Index yet investing in emerging markets too. "Investment managers like ourselves do a significant amount of due diligence on behalf of our investors: assessing country, political, macro-economic and counterparty risks," he says.

Mr Geffen adds that markedly decreased risk profiles coupled with vast currency reserves (China's are approaching $2trn (£1.2trn), more than the combined FX reserves of the OECD) better positions emerging economies to weather a global downturn. Therefore, he adds: "To relegate such opportunities to a small weighting in a global context would be a far greater risk."