Feb. 21--Asian markets are still among the best places to invest as they continue to offer some of the best valuations for long-term investors, says a leading fund manager.

"We have an overweight [position] on some of the markets in the region such as South Korea and Thailand apart from the same rating in other emerging markets such as Brazil," said Amit Bhartia, a partner at GMO LLC, which manages more than $100 billion globally.

Mr Bhartia manages the regional GMO office in Singapore and has a portfolio of about $8 billion dedicated to emerging markets, with Thailand attracting as much as $500 million.

While investors such as GMO recognise that conditions are volatile and they need to invest at the appropriate time, certain markets are very attractive as they have come down sharply and are trading below their fundamentals.

"These markets offer good valuation sand one of them is Thailand as the market did not go up so sharply in the first place to see the formation of a bubble," Mr Bhartia says.

The Asian markets that endured the financial crisis in 1997 have relatively intact banking systems, the pillars of growth for these economies.

Mr Bhartia says that his focus is also more geared toward other emerging markets than the usual suspects such as China and India, where too many investors are now scrambling for a limited number of good stocks.

He attributes the sharp decline in the Chinese and the Indian markets to the outflow of funds by institutional investors who were now running for safe havens.

"Their return to these markets will take time as they have been burned, and this is the reason why we saw more than $40 billion in funds flow out of emerging markets during last year."

Citing a recent report from the World Bank, he said that investments in the region were not likely to return that quickly, but added that this creates opportunities for funds such as GMO.

The World Bank in a recent report forecast that foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing nations would drop by $180 billion, or 31 percent, this year as the global recession prompts multinationals to cut spending on factories and mines.

The decline will put renewed pressure on emerging-market currencies, even as asset sales by fund managers slow, said Mansoor Dailami, manager of international finance in the World Bank's global development prospects group.

"This is the most serious reaction so far to the global recession, the factory level," Mr Dailami told Bloomberg recently. "Most emerging-market currencies are already under pressure and this tendency will continue.