International capital flows, while potentially beneficial, are said to increase a country's vulnerability to crisis - especially if they are skewed to non-FDI types. This paper studies whether the volume and composition of capital flows affect the degree of credit crunch faced by a country's...

Alexander Swoboda is one of the originators of the bipolar view that capital mobility creates pressure for countries to abandon intermediate exchange rate arrangements in favor of greater flexibility and harder pegs. This paper takes another look at the evidence for this hypothesis using two...

Cross-country regressions suggest little connection from foreign capital inflows to more rapid economic growth for developing countries and emerging markets. This suggests that the lack of domestic savings is not the primary constraint on growth in these economies, as implicitly assumed in the...

It has been a remarkably difficult empirical task to identify clear-cut real effects of exchange-rate regimes on the open economy. Similarly, no definitive view emerges as to the aggregate effects of capital account liberalizations. The main hypothesis of the paper is that a direct and an...

In spite of significant institutional and macroeconomic reforms over the last decade or two, capital flows to developing economies remain highly volatile. In 1996, net private capital flows to emerging markets reached US$230 billions; by 1997 these flows had been cut in half; by 1998 halved...

This paper investigates the potential impacts of the degree of divergence in open macroeconomic policies in the context of the trilemma hypothesis. Using an index that measures the relative policy divergence among the three trilemma policy choices, namely monetary independence, exchange rate...

According to the consensus view in growth and development economics, cross country differences in per-capita income largely reflect differences in countries' total factor productivity. We argue that this view has powerful implications for patterns of capital flows: everything else equal,...

One of the nest serious consequences of the debt crisis of 1982 has been the reduction in the accessibility to the world capital market for most developing countries. This situation has proved to be particularly serious for Latin American nations. At this juncture, a key question is how to...

This paper presents a simple two-country model of the role of taxation in capital flows between developed countries ("The North") and developing countries ("The South"). The Southern country is assumed to be unable to enforce a tax on its residents' foreign-source income, and the Northern...

We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model of foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign technology adoption, incorporating adoption barriers, international technology spillover, and relative price advantages. A higher FDI conversion efficacy, a lower adoption barrier, or a stronger...