Emerging market stocks rose to the highest level in over 16 months, extending their biggest yearly gain on record after China pledged to maintain stimulus programmes that have helped bolster the global economy.

The MSCI Emerging Markets Index ended 0.9 per cent to 989.47. Turkey’s ISE National Index rose 2.2 per cent to the highest in almost 12 months, while Serbra’s Belex 15 jumped 2.7 per cent, leading gains among 91 global benchmark gauges. The MSCI index’s close was the highest since August 11, 2008 and extend a 2009 gain to 75 per cent, the biggest advance since records began in 1988. Bonds also posted a record annual rally.

Next year will be a crucial time for strengthening the recovery and “defeating” the financial crisis, China’s Central Bank Governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, said in a New Year message, reiterating that a “moderately loose” monetary policy will continue.

The MSCI index surged as developing nation’s avoided most of the $1.7 trillion of credit losses and write-downs that triggered the global recession and investors speculated that recovery would be faster in emerging markets than advanced countries.

“The performance of emerging markets has been beyond most people’s wildest dreams at the beginning of the year”, Chief Emerging-Market Strategist at TD Securities Ltd in London, Beat Si-Egenthaler, said.

Developing economies will continue to attract investors next year because of a “superior economic outlook, sounder fiscal fundamentals and overall current lower levels of exposure by global institutional investors such as pension funds”.

Emerging-markets economies will expand 5.1 per cent as a group next year, compared with 1.3 per cent in accordance to an October report by the Washington –based International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Developing nation debt costs, which secured last year as Ukraine, Hungary and other emerging countries turned to the IMF to avoid default, dropped by over four percentage points this year to about 2.8 percentage points higher than United States (U.S) Treasuries, the biggest annual decline since JP Morgan Chase & Co.’s EMBI+ index began tracking the data in 1998. Yield spreads on the benchmark index dropped four basis points recently to 2.77 percentage points.

Crude oil increased 0.4 per cent to $79.62 a barrel in New York. The price gained 78 per cent in 2009, the biggest annual advance since 1999, on optimism consumption will rebound as the global economy recovers higher prices boost the earnings outlook for stocks in developing economies that are sustained by energy experts.