^*Maurice Obstfeld is the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley. This article was prepared as a background paper for the Commission on Growth and Development and originally published as "International Finance and Growth in Developing Countries: What Have We Learned?" World Bank Growth Commission Working Paper Series Number 34. The author is grateful for assistance from Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, José Antonio Rodríguez-Lopez, Lorenz Küng, and Mary Yang. The current draft has benefited from discussions with Sara Guerschanik Calvo, Julian di Giovanni, Barry Eichengreen, Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, Peter Blair Henry, Ayhan Kose, Alan M. Taylor, Roberto Zagha, and an anonymous referee, as well as from comments at the April 9, 2007 conference in New York organized by the Commission. Thanks go as well to Sebastian Edwards for supplying the updated Edwards (2007) data on capital controls.

Abstract

Despite an abundance of cross-sectional, panel, and event studies, there is strikingly little convincing documentation of direct positive impacts of financial opening on the economic welfare levels or growth rates of developing countries. The econometric difficulties are similar to those that bedevil the literature on trade openness and growth though, if anything, they are more severe in the context of international finance. There is also little systematic evidence that financial opening raises welfare indirectly by promoting collateral reforms of economic institutions or policies. At the same time, opening the financial account does appear to raise the frequency and severity of economic crises. Nonetheless, developing countries continue to move in the direction of further financial openness. A plausible explanation is that financial development is a concomitant of successful economic growth, and a growing financial sector in an economy open to trade cannot long be insulated from cross-border financial flows. This survey discusses the policy framework in which financial globalization is most likely to prove beneficial for developing countries. The reforms developing countries need to carry out to make their economies safe for international asset trade are the same reforms they need to carry out to curtail the power of entrenched economic interests and liberate the economy's productive potential.