This paper was prepared for the Seminar The New Wave of Capital Inflows: Sea Change or Tide? Annual Meetings of the Board of Governors, Inter-American Development Bank and Inter-American Investment CorporationWill capital inflows boom again in Latin America as countries recover from the 1998-99...

Financial liberalization and integration have generated disappointing results. They were supposed to set up a win-win situation: capital would flow from capital-abundant, low-return, aging industrial countries to capital-scarce, high-return, young emerging countries. Growth in receiving...

This paper studies the proposition that capital inflows tend to take the form of FDI -i.e., the share of FDI in total liabilities tends to be higher- in countries that are safer, more promising and with better institutions and policies. It finds that this view is patently wrong since it stands...

This paper provides an overview and assessment of reform initiatives, both those currently on the table and those that are not but should be. The intent is to clarify the logic behind these proposals and assess them from a Latin American perspective. For each core initiative examined in this...

It has been common to attribute financial crises to short-term capital inflows, while foreign direct investment (FDI) is seen as a safer form of finance. The relationship between crises and the composition of capital flows is particularly relevant at present because the flow of capital to Latin...