Many policy makers and corporate chieftains flocking to a village in the Swiss Alps now say that the rosy notion of a world powered by emerging-market growth needs to be reconsidered.

Ever since emerging markets became a major asset class in the early 1990s, a parade of potentates, policy makers and corporate chieftains have flocked to the stylish village of Davos in the Swiss Alps in the hope of becoming the latest global meme.

The growth revolution in China, the emergence of oil-driven sovereign wealth in the Middle East and Brazil’s economic miracle have all been celebrated, one time or another, by the global elites who gather at the World Economic Forum in Davos each January to ponder the world.

From 2000 on, the Davos boom and the emerging markets boom have been pretty much one and the same, a living ideal of globalization helped by central banks that have printed trillions of dollars of new money.

But now, as interest rates in the United States begin to rise, these dollars have begun to flow out of China, the Middle East and Latin America. Growth rates are stumbling, debt levels rising and geopolitical fears spreading.

Over the last year, the exodus has gathered pace, fed by worries that China will lose control of its currency, the price of oil will drop to $20 a barrel, and Brazil’s problems will worsen.

And many now say that this rosy, Davos-fueled notion of a world powered by emerging-market growth and innovation needs to be reconsidered.

“I have long maintained that the emerging-market hype was oversold when it was clear that what was going on was high commodity prices and cheap money,” said Dani Rodrik, an expert on globalization at the Harvard Kennedy School.

As for the World Economic Forum in Davos, he said that over the last 10 years it had become an echo chamber of sorts.

Actually, the echo chamber has not been working as advertised. Since January 2010, emerging markets as an investment have produced a poor return. BlackRock’s benchmark exchange traded fund for emerging market stocks is down 25 percent, and most of that decline came in the last year.

Perhaps the biggest sign that global investors have lost faith is that for the first time since 1988 (when only the bravest souls invested in these countries), investors have pulled more money out of emerging markets than they have put in, according to research by the Institute of International Finance.

In an unusually blunt speech in Paris this month, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said that emerging nations needed a new model for growth after years of relying on easy money and high commodity prices.

“Growth rates are down, and cyclical and structural forces have undermined the traditional growth paradigm,” Ms. Lagarde said. Moreover, she warned, the dollar’s continued strength against just about all emerging-market currencies could well result in a new round of financial uncertainty, pushing commodity prices and global growth forecasts even lower.

Since mid-2011, the dollar has gained more than 100 percent against emerging-market currencies in Turkey, Brazil and South Africa. And over the last six months, following China’s decision to depreciate the renminbi, previously robust monetary units in Singapore, Korea and Taiwan have also started to lose value against the dollar.

“Our own estimates show that a slowdown of 1 percent in the emerging world would lower growth in advanced countries by at least about 0.2 percentage points,” Ms. Lagarde said.

Still, even with the gloom and doom surrounding emerging markets these days, there is little sign that standard bearers are forgoing their annual week in the Swiss mountains.

This year, more than 320 representatives from Brazil, Russia, India and China — the so-called BRIC community of emerging nations — will be in Davos — compared with 237 from these countries in 2010.

None of these representatives will be heads of state, though. In the past, Brazilian presidents and Vladimir Putin of Russia have led their countries’ delegations. This year, Russia is sending a deputy prime minister, Yury Trutnev, while China is sending a vice president, Li Yuanchao.

Two large emerging markets that have been under significant stress of late will be sending their leaders. Turkey, recently rocked by terrorist attacks, will be represented by its prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu. And the South African president, Jacob Zuma, who has gone through three finance ministers in the last five weeks, is also planning to show up.

The president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, whose popularity polls have sunk to single digits, will not be making an appearance, but her recently appointed finance minister, Nelson Henrique Barbosa-Filho, is scheduled to attend.

Ready to engage in some damage control will be the top executives at BTG Pactual, the Brazilian investment bank whose former chief executive, André Esteves, is under investigation for corruption.

In terms of panels themed for developing nations, the World Economic Forum will be serving up the usual fare this year. One will explore how companies in emerging markets cope with laws that discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers. Another is more straightforward: What will the impact of higher interest rates in the United States be on emerging market growth?

But, as is always the case at the World Economic Forum, the meetings of genuine consequence will be the ones that you do not know are happening.

That could mean Laurence D. Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, the world’s largest money management firm, sitting down with Jean-Paul Villain, an executive at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, or Fahad al-Mubarak, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s central bank and overseer of the country’s $650 billion foreign reserve stash.

As oil prices sink, rumors have been rife that Middle East sovereign wealth funds — and Saudi Arabia in particular — have been calling in the billions of dollars of cash that they have allocated to global investment firms such as BlackRock. And traders say that the withdrawal of these funds, much of which has been invested in American stocks and bonds, has been a contributing factor to recently volatile markets.

Or the chief executives of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase could wind up huddling with Fang Xinghai, the vice chairman of the China securities regulatory commission. The sharp swings in China’s stock market are having an outsize effect on markets in the United States, and the big American investment banks will want to hear what Mr. Fang’s strategy is for 2016.

But as central bankers, prime ministers and chief executives wrestle this week to make sense of it all, Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, has a fairly simple explanation: The impact on the developed world of a slowdown in China and other emerging markets is going to be greater than most people realize.

“In 1997, the emerging world’s share of the global economy was 20 percent — now, it’s nearly 40 percent,” he said. “This is a big deal. What happens in China has an effect on the wider world, and I think that the Davos crowd has been slow to recognize this.”