The overall degree of international equity market connectedness has gradually increased
over the past two decades. Reflecting the shift in global economic power, it has been recently suggested to pay more attention to the BRICT (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Turkey) countries. Building on, and methodologically adding to, an established approach to market connectedness, this study makes an effort to assess the connectedness of these markets, together with developed equity markets. Our methodological contributions consist of the analysis of information propagation, based on Markov chains and information entropy. We find that the BRICT countries’ degree of equity market connectedness has increased substantially since the early 2000s, with Brazil and China being the most and least connected equity market, respectively. Furthermore, we find an “informational divide” among BRICT markets insofar as the magnitude of market repercussions of a hypothetical shock within BRICT still depends on the origin of the shock, which is in contrast to western developed markets. We also find that the amount of news produced by the BRICT markets is getting more uniform and approaches the level of developed markets.