آیا باز بودن جریان های مالی بین المللی باعث افزایش رشد بهره وری است ؟

Economic theory has identified a number of channels through which openness to international financial flows could raise productivity growth. However, while there is a vast empirical literature analyzing the impact of financial openness on output growth, far less attention has been paid to its effects on productivity growth. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between financial openness and total factor productivity (TFP) growth using an extensive dataset that includes various measures of productivity and financial openness for a large sample of countries. We find that de jure capital account openness has a robust positive effect on TFP growth. The effect of de facto financial integration on TFP growth is less clear, but this masks an important and novel result. We find strong evidence that FDI and portfolio equity liabilities boost TFP growth while external debt is actually negatively correlated with TFP growth. The negative relationship between external debt liabilities and TFP growth is attenuated in economies with higher levels of financial development and better institutions.

A central debate in international finance is whether openness to foreign capital has significant growth benefits and whether, in the case of developing countries, these benefits outweigh the risks. In theory, there are a number of direct and indirect channels through which financial openness should increase economic growth. Yet there is little robust empirical evidence of a causal link between financial openness and economic growth. This is not for want of effort – a number of empirical studies have attempted to systematically examine whether financial openness contributes to growth using various approaches. The majority of these studies, however, tend to find no effect or at best a mixed effect for developing countries (see Kose et al., in press, for an extensive survey).

In this paper, we have provided a comprehensive empirical analysis of the relationship between financial openness and TFP growth. We find strong evidence that financial openness, as measured by de jure capital account openness, is associated with higher medium-term TFP growth. These results are robust to our attempts to deal with potential problems of endogeneity and reverse causality, leading us to the view that this may in fact be a causal relationship. But it is a subtle one. The level of de facto financial integration, as measured by the stock of external liabilities to GDP, is not correlated with TFP growth. But splitting up the stock of external liabilities reveals a novel and interesting result. FDI and equity inflows (cumulated over decade-long periods) contribute to TFP growth while debt inflows have the opposite effect. The negative effect of stocks of external debt liabilities on TFP is partially attenuated in economies with better-developed financial markets and better institutional quality.