After hitting the skids in 2013 and early this year, emerging markets have rebounded, with the MSCI Emerging Markets (stock) Index returning 6.6 percent in the last three months.

But don't let that recovery fool you, says MarketWatch columnist Howard Gold. "People invest in emerging markets on a demonstrably false premise: that higher economic growth leads to higher stock market returns," he writes.

"The evidence is clear that stock market returns don’t have much to do with GDP growth."

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The performance of the MSCI Emerging Markets Index in the last three years bears that out, with a negative annualized return of 3 percent, compared with a positive return of 16.2 percent for the S&P 500.

The annualized return of the MSCI Emerging Markets Index also lags that of the S&P 500 for the last five years — 7.4 percent versus 20 percent, respectively. To be sure, for the last 10 years the annualized return of the MSCI Emerging Markets Index beat the S&P 500 — 9.5 percent to 8.1 percent.

Over the truly long term, 1900 through 2013, developed markets' annualized returns topped emerging markets' returns — 8.3 percent to 7.7 percent, according to calculations by three experts at the London Business School, Gold says.

"Since 1950, however, emerging markets have outperformed developed markets by 12.5 percent to 10.8 percent annually," Gold notes.

New research from BlackRock finds that since 1992, stock markets of 10 major emerging economies captured just 73 percent of the GDP growth of the respective country.

"So, if an economy was growing by, say, 8 percent a year, its stock market returned only 5.8 percent to investors," Gold explains.

Not everyone shares his views. "Improving sentiment and the consequent market recovery have benefited those investors who remained focused on emerging markets," Mark Coombs, CEO of U.K. money manager Ashmore Group, said in a statement.

"Looking ahead, the prospects for investment returns are enhanced by the ongoing development of the asset class."

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