From the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, per-capita GDP in the economies of East Asia grew almost three times as fast as in the economies of Latin America. Specifically, in 1950, the economies of the Asian Tigers (Japan, South Korea, Singapore and...

Does capital flow to locations with a relatively high rate of return? We address this question by constructing a panel database of over 100 countries between 1950 and 2005, accounting for about 99 percent of world real income in 2005. With these data, we construct two measures of the rate of...