Wealth bias in the first global capital market boom, 1870-1913

Michael A. Clemens and Jeffrey Gale Williamson ()

Economic Journal, 2004, vol. 114, issue 495, pages 304-337

Abstract: Why do rich countries receive the lion's share of international investment flows? Although this "wealth bias" is strong today, it was even stronger during the first global capital market boom before 1913. Very little of British capital exports went to poor countries, whether colonies or not. This paper constructs panel data for 34 countries that as a group received 92% of British capital. It concludes that international capital market failure had only second-order effects on the geographical distribution of British capital. The three local fundamentals that mattered most were schooling, natural resources and demography. Copyright 2004 Royal Economic Society.

Date: 2004
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/servlet/useragent ... &year=2004&part=null link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecj:econjl:v:114:y:2004:i:495:p:304-337

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... al.asp?ref=0013-0133

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Journal is edited by Antonio Ciccone, Leonardo Felli, Steve Machin, Andrew Scott, Steve Pischke and David Myatt

More articles in Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().