The question that has long been hanging in the balance for investors is whether overseas adventures are a path to riches or the road to perdition.

Then along came the countries that comprise the BRIC, a handy acronym for Brazil, Russia, India and China. Besides being a set of fast-growth emerging economies with burgeoning middle classes, they are also home to more than 40 percent of the world’s population. That is the kind of scale investors crave: billions of people with endless real estate needs of all stripes.

Their rapid GDP growth made the BRICs the Ferrari Testarossas of the emerging world, investment vehicles that were covering a lot of ground in a short amount of time. Unfortunately, the Ferraris are not rolling as they once did. With the exception of China, growth in other BRIC countries has downshifted several gears and is now moving at a pace that is hard to get excited about. Consider that the International Monetary Fund forecasts that Brazil and Russia w