The Indian stock market has emerged as the third best performing in the world last year, even ahead of its Chinese counterpart, latest data show.

An analysis of US dollar return data, available with the global market intelligence service provider MSCI Barra for equity markets across all the emerging countries, shows that Indian bourses have delivered the third highest gain of 71.23% during last year.

Globally, the emerging market Peru has given the highest 86% returns to the investors, followed by another Latin American country Brazil with 75.35%. Among the developed markets, Finland is the best performing market, giving over 45% returns till December 31, 2007. It is followed by Hong Kong and Germany with 37% and 32.52% returns respectively.

In the GCC and Arabian region, Egyptian market has given the highest gains of over 54% in 2007, followed by Oman and Saudi Arabia, which returned gains of 51% and 50% respectively.

Meanwhile, in terms of local currency, Indian markets have given fourth best performance (52%), while China has given the second best returns. Peru tops with highest returns even in local currency, with 82.21% returns in the year, followed by China with over 63% gains. Indonesian markets provided third highest returns of 57.5% in terms of local currency, the MSCI data show.

Besides, the Bombay Stock Exchange's benchmark index, Sensex, gained 47% in 2007. The index ended at 20,289 points on December 31 in 2007 from 13,787 on December 29 in the previous year.