文档介绍：Making Markets Work:
How Domestic Capital Market Reform Can Improve Access to Global Finance
Peter Blair Henry*Peter Blair Henry: Associate Professor of Economics, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business; Stanford, CA 94305-5015; ******@. Henry gratefully acknowledges the financial support of an NSF CAREER award and the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). ** Peter Lombard Lorentzen: . candidate, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business; Stanford, CA 94305-5015; lorentzen_******@. This paper was prepared for the 5th Annual Financial Markets and Development Conference: The Future of Domestic Capital Markets in Developing Countries, sponsored by the World Bank, the International ary Fund and the Brookings Institution.
and Peter Lombard Lorentzen**
April 2003
1. Introduction
Over a decade ago Robert Lucas asked the following question: why doesn’t capital flow from rich to poor countries? His point was simple. Less-developed countries have lower capital-to-labor ratios than do rich countries. Under standard neoclassical assumptions, this means that the rate of return to capital in these countries is higher than in the developed world. In order to equalize returns, profit-seeking capitalists should export capital to the developing world until risk-adjusted rates of return are equalized. In other words, market pressures should lead to a resource transfer to less-developed countries, thus boosting their growth rates, and Lucas was encouraging us to think about the obstacles that prevented this flow from occurring.
At the time Lucas asked his question, the prevailing wisdom was that capital flows to developing countries were a good idea. More than ten years later, intellectual opinion has shifted. A heated debate over capital account liberalization has followed in the wake of financial crises in Asia, Russia and Latin America. Opponents of the process now argue that capital account liberalization i