آزاد سازی تجارت، آزادسازی حساب سرمایه و اثر واقعی از توسعه مالی

This paper provides evidence that international economic integration changes the real effect of domestic financial institutions. Using a cross-country panel we show that domestic financial development has a smaller effect on growth in countries that are open to trade and capital flows than among countries that are closed in both dimensions. We then use sectoral data to show that this decline in the importance of financial development can be explained by its irrelevance for tradable sectors in countries that are fully integrated to the world economy. We also explore the consequences of these findings for the sequencing of reform.

The last 30 years have witnessed a burst in trade and capital account liberalization. For instance, according to Wacziarg and Welch (2003) the percentage of countries open to trade increased from 16 to 73% between 1960 and 2000, and Edwards (2004) reports that the degree of capital mobility has increased in all regions of the world between 1970 and 2000. Also, as we will show later, in our sample of 108 countries for the 1970–2003 period, the number of countries that allows free trade grew from 24 to 88 in the case of goods, and from 10 to 47 for capital. A number of studies have attempted to document the real effects of international integration (Sachs and Warner, 1995; Quinn, 1997; among many others). The benefits on the aggregate of lifting barriers to trade and capital flows, and particularly the latter, are still debated. Indeed, the disparate performance – both in terms of the effects on growth and the continuation of the reform process – of many middle-income countries that liberalized since the late 1980s precipitated research on the question of weather international integration has different effects across countries with dissimilar domestic institutional quality (Rodrik, 1999). A related angle is the impact that integration can have on the development of local institutions (see Rodrik, 2000, Levine and Schmukler, 2005 and Klein and Olivei, 1999). As more and more research points to the importance of institutions for growth (see Acemoglu et al., 2005 for a review of the literature), determining the way the massive process of integration might interact with these becomes essential.

The effect of financial development on growth is far from homogeneous across sectors and across international integration regimes. Non-tradable sectors are especially promoted by better-functioning financial systems, and domestic financial development exerts a larger impact when the economies are not integrated to the world. Moreover, while tradables and non-tradables benefit significantly from increased financial depth when the economy is closed to trade and capital, the degree of domestic financial development appears to be irrelevant for the tradables whence the economy is fully integrated to the world. These results are relevant for both the financial development and the international integration literatures. For the former, this paper qualifies the main result that financial development exerts a causal and significant positive effect on growth, extends the evidence by using data across sectors beyond manufacturing, and shows that local factors – the degree of integration, in particular – significantly change the impact of financial development on growth. Overall, despite the fact that the positive effect of domestic financial development on growth is shown not to be always present, the evidence is far from damaging for the case in favor of an important role of finance for growth. Indeed, domestic financial development appeared to matter most precisely when it should: when alternative ways of obtaining financing are not as readily available (when the country is not integrated internationally), and for those sectors that are most dependent on local financial institutions (the non-tradables). Of course, we recognize that our evidence – as in much of the finance and growth literature – is of indirect nature and so our interpretation should be taken with caution.23