This paper evaluates (1) whether the exogenous component of financial intermediary development influences economic growth and (2) whether cross-country differences in legal and accounting systems (e.g., creditor rights, contract enforcement, and accounting standards) explain differences in the...

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of external vulnerability using panel data methods for a worldwide sample of countries. Controlling for domestic conditions, the paper examines the growth volatility effects of outcome measures of trade and financial openness as well as four types of...

FDI flows to developing countries surged in the 1990s, to become their leading source of external financing. This rise in FDI volume was accompanied by a marked change in its composition: investment taking the form of acquisition of existing assets (M&A) grew much more rapidly than investment in...

Saving rates display considerable variation across countries and over time. This paper investigates the factors behind these broad saving disparities using a large cross-country time-series data set constructed for the World Bank Saving project. The paper assesses empirically the policy and...

This paper attempts to reconcile the apparent contradiction between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private...

The main goals of the present report are: first, describe the main stylized facts of growth in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) countries compared to typical countries in the world over the 1960-2000 period. Second, we attempt to explain the economic growth performance in LAC countries...

This paper estimates empirical relations between saving rates and their economic and demographic determinants in Chile. Using annual data for 1960-1997, the paper analyzes saving aggregates by economic agents or sectors: aggregate private-sector saving, corporate and household saving, and...

This paper analyzes common economic patterns across countries and economic sectors in Latin America, East Asia and Europe for the period 1970-94. This is done by means of an error-components model that decomposes real value-added growth in each country into common international effects,...

This paper explores empirically the role of risk and return factors in the observed evolution of net foreign asset positions of a large number of industrial and developing economies. The paper adopts a dynamic approach in which investors’ portfolios adjust gradually to their long-run...

The objective of this paper is to provide an exhaustive characterization of the empirical linkage between current account deficits and a broad set of economic variables proposed by the literature. In order to accomplish this task, we complement and extend previous empirical research by (1) using...