Dividend-paying stocks have been catching the attention of investors these days -- with nearly $13 billion in new money flowing into dividend-focused mutual funds this year. But while most have focused on the high yields of some American firms, experts say some of the richest payouts are coming from overseas: Emerging-market stocks, as a group, hiked their dividends 55 percent last year, far above those of their U.S. counterparts. And pros say exchange-traded funds could be the best way for most U.S. investors to jump on the foreign dividend bandwagon.

ETF designers, in fact, have been rushing out a slew of products that screen popular indexes of foreign stocks and pluck out firms with either the biggest yields or the largest total payouts. BlackRock and State Street, big players in the ETF arena, now have offerings in this category. But the largest by far is the four-year-old, $1.7 billion WisdomTree Emerging Markets Equity Income (DEM), which recently yielded 3.5 percent. To be sure, other dividend-focused ETFs hold stocks from all over the world -- but, perhaps counterintuitively, the offerings centered on emerging market stocks might be less risky than more global products, says Morningstar ETF analyst Patricia Oey. The reason? More-diversified foreign dividend stock ETFs, she says, tend to own European banks, a sector in trouble, as a result of the debt problems plaguing the Old World.

But there's a catch. While emerging-market ETFs avoid European banks, they also underplay two popular emerging-market countries: China and India. Experts say that while firms in those nations might be able to hike their profits -- and stock prices -- many companies there haven't made paying dividends a priority. These new ETFs are loaded with stocks from some less-explored areas, such as Taiwan and Malaysia. Ultimately, some planners say, focusing on dividend payers can help limit the risk inherent in emerging markets. That's because "you can't fake cash flow," says Kevin M. Reardon, president of Shakespeare Wealth Management in Pewaukee, Wis. "And you really can't pay a dividend if you don't have cash flow."