Financial Globalization And Growth Revisited - International And Regional Evidence

The effects of financial globalization on economic growth have been put in focus by a more recent branch of globalization literature. In academic circles and international policy arena a strong push towards capital openness and free movement of capital across borders had been seen during the 1990s. While the early arguments suggested positive effects of financial globalization on economic growth, more recently, both theoretical and empirical studies have started seriously questioning this benign view of financial globalization calling for additional evidence. This paper revisits the link between financial globalization and growth using the KOF index of globalization in a sample of 134 world economies in the period 1970-2015. With a large number of countries and application of the panel data estimations techniques this paper provides strong evidence on the link between financial globalization and economic growth. In the broad sample of world economies financial globalization exerts a negative and statistically significant effects on economic growth. The paper also investigates this relationship in the regions of East Asia and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe and Central Asia and the negative effects are also predominant in the regional grouping of countries.