Given the scale and intensity of the crisis that has gripped large parts of the financial system, it can be easy to forget that not all activity has ground to a halt. In large parts of the corporate sector - particularly the commodities industry - executives could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. But the sense of detachment from London and New York is most pronounced in emerging economies. Viewed from Mumbai, Singapore or Shanghai, the turmoil in the capital markets looks like a distant local problem with little relevance or impact on the other side of the world. In China and India, stock markets have been hitting new highs. Rather than suffering from a shortage of liquidity like their counterparts in the west, Chinese banks are grappling with a surplus.

It remains to be seen whether this sense of detachment will persist, particularly if the US economy stops growing at the same rate it has maintained in recent years. For the time being, however, the decoupling of emerging markets from the west has created a ripe opportunity for acquisitions. Recent activity by sovereign wealth funds, which have taken stakes in a range of US and European financial institutions, has added to the sense that the flow of activity - from west to east - has been reversed.

Yet a glance at the figures shows that this trend has been gathering pace for some time. Cross-border acquisitions by companies in Brazil, China, India and Russia - the so-called BRIC countries - have increased in value every year since 2003. By mid-November, the volume of cross-border M&A activity from these countries had reached almost $69bn - close to the total for 2006, according to figures from Thomson Financial.

The data mask some striking geographical shifts, however. Much of this year's increase has come from China, where cross-border activity has been increasing steadily for several years. The volume of activity from India has remained high, while dealflow from Brazil has fallen. There has also been a shift in the industries where this activity has been most pronounced. Given the emphasis on securing access to natural resources, particularly from China, it will come as little surprise that materials remains the most active sector for cross-border deals emanating from the BRIC countries. But the volume of activity in this area is significantly lower this year than in 2006, when it reached $43bn and accounted for almost two of every three dollars spent on cross-border deals. Energy and power acquisitions have also slipped compared with last year.

This year financials have taken up the slack, typified by deals such as ICBC's acquisition of a 20 per cent stake in Standard Bank of South Africa. This has helped lift activity in financials to around $16bn by mid-November - double the volume for last year.

Of course, not all this activity is directed at western economies, as emerging economies are also increasingly investing in each other, or in other developing markets such as Africa. Yet even though the proportion has fallen slightly, more than 70 per cent of the cross-border M&A activity from BRIC countries has this year involved targets in the Americas or western Europe. If valuations continue to diverge, there is bound to be more.