But, in contrast to that prophecy, at the end of the day the countries that did not have to bail out any of their financial institutions were, with one exception (Malta), located typically in the CEE region. So it seems to me that GDP per capita, human development and industrial tradition are not the criteria driving the market’s classification of “emerging” economies. Should euro membership automatically make a country “developed”? In other words, does giving up independent monetary policy make a country more “stable”? But why, then, isn’t Bulgaria considered a developed country, when it holds a fixed exchange rate against the euro? Why not Kosovo and Montenegro, which have adopted the euro unilaterally? Much space has been devoted to the so-called decoupling debate, in which many experts 1/2  BIS central bankers' speeches  claimed that emerging countries were less affected by the global financial crisis. But with the benefit of hindsight, we now know that the GDP declines in emerging countries were, on average, just as steep as those experienced by developed countries. A part of the explanation, once again, lies in the confusing taxonomy: we see huge differences among individual emerging countries as well, even within BRICS. I suggest an analogy to the decoupling debate: we are now observing a “BRICS decoupling” to the power of two: only China and India have shown robust growth since the Great Recession. Russia, Brazil and South Africa have been stagnating, each for its own specific reasons.
But the Czech Republic has a higher GDP per capita than Portugal (or Greece, for that matter, and many other countries in the euro area) and is getting closer and closer to Spain, a solidly developed country according to all measures. The Czech Republic also has a human development index comparable to that of Austria and Italy. In fact, living standards in the Czech Republic have been higher than those in Portugal for at least a quarter of a millennium, since the start of the industrial revolution (with the possible exception of a couple of decades centred on 1990). But once a country enters the euro area, it is almost automatically treated as a developed country, even in the eyes of the markets. Personally, I find that rather confusing. In practice, therefore, we observe that some nominally “emerging” countries (such as Poland, Israel and Singapore) have been dealing with exactly the same issues as the nominally developed ones. At the same time, some nominally developed countries (such as Greece) are dealing with problems typical of developing countries, issues including incomplete land registries and an insufficient basic ability to collect taxes. This confusion in taxonomy complicates our discussion a great deal, especially in the years of the crisis and its aftermath. The question at the beginning of the crisis was: who in Europe will prove to be most vulnerable to shocks? Many believed it would be Central and Eastern European countries.