Now that the dust is beginning to settle, the Greek crisis can be seen as an extraordinary act of self-immolation by a government that misjudged economic reality. While Athens was turning an economy that was widely expected to grow 2.7% this year into a basket-case that is now back in recession and whose stock market slumped 16% when it reopened on Monday after a five-week closure, the recovery in the rest of the eurozone has been gathering momentum.

The Irish economy is growing at an annualized rate of more than 5%; the Spanish government is now forecasting growth of 3.3% this year. Spanish unemployment registered its biggest fall since 2007 in July; Portuguese unemployment is now at its lowest since late 2010, albeit still in the double digits.

Growth elsewhere in the eurozone may be less spectacular but the recovery is now clearly gathering pace, even in Italy and France.

In fact, the Greek crisis obscured not only the positive economic news in the rest of the eurozone, but also the more worrying news in emerging markets.

This year emerging markets are likely to see the slowest growth and first year of declining exports since 2009, according to Murat Ulgen, head of emerging-markets research at HSBC. They have been hit hard by the slump in commodity prices and the slowdown in China, prompting investors to pull out their money. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index fell 13.4% in the year to the end of July and is on course to fall for the fourth year in the past five, while Goldman Sachs’s emerging-market currency index has fallen almost 25% relative to the dollar.

Central to this emerging-market slump is the unprecedented weakness of world trade, which has now grown by less than global output for the past four years, unique since World War II. Apart from a brief recovery in 2010, global trade volumes since the start of the global financial crisis have fallen well below the levels in the 1990s and early 2000s.

What is more, the boost to the global economy from trade has been weakening: A dollar of trade today delivers less than half the boost to global output that it did between 1986 and 2000, according to the World Bank. For emerging-market economies, which have historically been highly dependent on exports, this presents a major challenge.

Until recently, most investors assumed this slowdown was primarily cyclical and trade would pick up as developed markets in the U.S. and Europe recovered. There is some truth in this: Highly indebted European countries have slashed their demand for imports since the financial crisis, reflected in trade balances that have swung sharply into surplus. As unemployment falls and consumer confidence recovers across much of Europe, emerging markets should see some recovery in demand for their exports.

But it is now clear that there is also a significant structural element to the weakness in trade, reflecting changes in the global economy, note UBS analysts Andrew Cave and Bhanu Baweja.

These include a permanent shift in China’s growth model away from construction toward services; the deglobalization of finance, as banks such as HSBC and Barclays respond to new regulatory pressures by pulling back from foreign markets; the impact of new technologies, including in areas such as computing and shale-gas drilling, that allow companies to shorten supply chains; increasing protectionism, reflected in political opposition to the free-trade agreements under discussion between the U.S. and countries in the Pacific region and between the U.S. and European Union; and the high levels of debt in many advanced economies, which will continue to act as a drag on demand.

This structural shift in the pattern of global trade has profound implications for the economic models of many emerging markets. Trade has been one of the main engines of higher living standards. In the past, they could rely on currency devaluations to improve their competitiveness and help pull their economies out of the mire. But this time may be different: There may no longer be the demand for what they produce.

That means corporate earnings, which have consistently missed analyst expectations by a wide margin for the past four years, will continue to disappoint as excess capacity lies idle and prices and margins come under pressure.

Companies faced with uneconomic returns on investment will come under pressure to deleverage and capital will head offshore, putting pressure on countries with large current-account deficits. That in turn is likely to weaken domestic demand and put pressure on fiscal balances.

A number of governments, including Brazil, Turkey and South Africa, are contemplating turning away from orthodox fiscal policy, moves that would only further undermine market confidence.

How can emerging markets reverse this trend? The answer is the same as that faced by countries caught up in the eurozone crisis: They need to undertake far-reaching reforms—of product and labor markets, of institutions and governance—to change their economic models, boost productivity and attract new investment.

So far, few emerging markets appear to be facing up to this challenge, with some exceptions including India, Poland and Mexico. Perhaps that is because monetary independence has shielded them from the kind of severe shocks that have forced much of Southern Europe into adopting reforms.

But that simply means that the crises in those countries that fail to reform are more likely to play out in slow motion. In that respect, Greece isn’t just a cautionary tale for the eurozone but for the world.