"In emerging markets across the board, all the numbers are pointing toward meaningfully slower growth" next year, Rajiv Jain, who oversees about $15 billion as a money manager at Vontobel Asset Management Inc. in New York, said in a Dec. 5 phone interview.

Jain's emerging-market equity fund beat 98 percent of peers this year, buoyed by holdings of beverage and tobacco companies whose profits are resilient to economic slowdowns.

2011 Losses

The BSE India Sensitive Index led declines among BRIC equity gauges this year, falling 23 percent. China's Shanghai Composite Index also dropped 23 percent, while Russia's Micex retreated 18 percent and Brazil's Bovespa sank 16 percent. The 21-country MSCI Emerging Markets Index lost 20 percent, while the S&P 500 gained 0.6 percent.

The MSCI BRIC Index slid 0.8 percent as of 8:30 a.m. in London and the MSCI Emerging Markets Index dipped 0.6 percent, set for the lowest close in a week. The Shanghai Composite gained 0.2 percent, the Sensex dropped 1.1 percent, while the Micex was little changed.

Egypt's EGX30 Index tumbled 49 percent this year, the biggest decline in emerging markets, as political turmoil stifled tourism and deterred foreign investment following the popular uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak. The Philippine Stock Exchange Index posted this year's largest gain, advancing 3.2 percent after higher consumer spending countered the global economic slowdown.

Peak Expansions

Longer-term economic growth rates in the BRIC nations are poised to drop as their working-age populations increase more slowly and then eventually shrink, according to a Goldman Sachs report on Dec. 7 titled "The BRICs 10 Years On: Halfway Through The Great Transformation."

"We have likely seen the peak in potential growth for the BRICs as a group," Dominic Wilson, an economist at Goldman Sachs, wrote in the report. Wilson made the New York-based firm's first detailed long-term forecasts for the BRIC nations in 2003, two years after Jim O'Neill, then head of economic research, coined the term.

O'Neill, now chairman of Goldman Sachs's asset-management unit, declined an interview request for this story. His latest book, "The Growth Map," talks of "rosy prospects" for the BRICs as well as the potential of the "Next Eleven" most populous emerging economies.

Fund Flows

Goldman Sachs's bullish outlook for the BRIC nations proved prescient as the economies expanded at an average pace of 6.6 percent during the past decade, more than four times faster than America, according to IMF data. Investors poured about $67 billion into Brazil, Russia, India, China and BRIC mutual funds from 2001 to 2010, data compiled by Cambridge, Massachusetts- based EPFR Global show.

This year's fund outflows were the biggest on an annual basis since at least 1996, according to EPFR Global. India equity funds recorded about $4 billion of net withdrawals, while China funds lost $3.6 billion. Investors pulled $2.2 billion from Brazil, $326 million from Russia and $5.3 billion from funds that invest in all four of the BRIC countries. All emerging-market funds tracked by EPFR Global had about $47 billion of outflows, leaving assets under management at $605 billion.