It's true -- India is no China. And Brazil's no Russia.

They've never been all that similar, really. In fact, Standard & Poor's recently questioned "whether the BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, China] countries ever shared much in common, other than scale and high portfolio inflows."

Well, of course they didn't. In other news, S&P 500 components Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) don't share much in common, except that they're both large U.S.-based companies.

You wouldn't think that Apple and Johnson & Johnson are interchangeable -- so don't fall for the idea that countries are interchangeable. If you do, you'll get burned.

First, the status quo
As investors (heck, as humans), we like to group things together. It simplifies complex information and gives us a way to make complicated decisions.

And when it comes to international investing, it's convention to lump countries into one of two categories: developed markets and emerging markets.

The exact distinction is hazy. Former Secretary-General of the U.N. Kofi Annan defines a developed market as "one that allows all its citizens to enjoy a free and healthy life in a safe environment." Political scientist Ian Bremmer defines an emerging market as "a country where politics matters at least as much as economics to the markets."

Basically, to be considered developed, a country needs a high standard of living that isn't continually threatened by political crisis. Besides the United States, think of countries such as Japan, France, and Australia.

The emerging markets are then split into the BRIC countries -- a term coined less than a decade ago by Goldman Sachs , because it was sexy to bundle together the four emerging-market countries that combined size with tremendous growth prospects -- and everyone else (countries such as Peru, Turkey, Egypt, and Thailand).

These groups are dangerous!
All of that splitting and grouping gives investors the false sense that the BRIC countries are essentially interchangeable: emerging, large, poised for growth.

Even basic country data demonstrates just how large this fallacy is:

Country

GDP per Person (in U.S. dollars)*

United States

47,000

Russia

16,000

Brazil

10,300

China

6,000 Continued...