Russell Investment Group, the creators of the small-cap Russell 2000 Index and other market-leading equity indexes, today launched a fully integrated family of global stock indicies.

The Russell Global Indexes provide investors worldwide with a comprehensive set of benchmarks that cover small-cap and large-cap companies in developed and emerging markets.

“The global investment market has changed as skilled investors adopt an increasingly global outlook and seek to invest in the best stocks from around the world with less emphasis on company size or country of origin,” said David Grieger, managing director, Russell Indexes, in a news release. “These investors are finding that distinctions between traditionally ‘emerging’ and ‘developed’ markets have blurred as companies and financial markets grow in sophistication. While the new investment panorama has increased opportunities for investors, it also has made it more difficult to evaluate performance.”

Grieger added that existing global benchmarks reflect only a sampling of stocks and not the entire investable universe.

“We’re extending globally our same pioneering index methodology that gives investors objective and transparent tools to accurately measure distinct U.S. market segments,” he said. “The 10,000 or so companies in this global benchmark are selected by float-adjusted market capitalization and their trading liquidity threshold, giving investors a cohesive and consistent framework for measuring investment performance globally-with no gaps or overlaps.”

Russell’s global index methodology is designed to benefit large plan sponsors as well as investment consultants, money managers and private wealth professionals who manage international assets. While providing investors with comprehensive coverage of the investable global market, it is built starting at the company level rather than on a country-relative basis.

“Russell’s unbiased and transparent methodology better reflects the true global marketplace,” Grieger said. “There is no sampling. The market dictates the index constituents. Our global index is designed to capture all sufficiently liquid stocks that are actively traded and readily accessible to global investors.”

The Russell Global Index, which uses the broad-market Russell 3000-Index as its U.S. component, is divided into 300 core indexes that cover 22 regions, 63 countries, developed and emerging markets, capitalization tiers of small, mid and large, as well as sectors.

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Russell offers the first truly global small-cap benchmarks for institutional investors. Russell’s global small-cap universe includes more than 7,000 investable companies from countries throughout the world. It includes the Russell 2000 as well as the Russell Nomura Small Cap Index in Japan.

Russell’s global-relative design eliminates the gaps and overlaps created by other index providers when investment managers benchmark portfolios to different regional indexes, and it helps investors avoid sampling bias inherent in indexes that only include selected stocks in different countries or regions.

Market capitalization breaks are applied globally, not on a country-by-country basis. For example, Russell uses the same cut-off point to determine small-cap stocks in the United Kingdom as it does in Panama. This process ensures that companies of the same size are accurately represented in the large- and small-cap indexes and across regions and countries.