Bad Investments and Missed Opportunities? Postwar Capital Flows to Asia and Latin America

Lee Ohanian, Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria and Mark Wright

No 563, Staff Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: After World War II, international capital flowed into slow-growing Latin America rather than fast-growing Asia. This is surprising as, everything else equal, fast growth should imply high capital returns. This paper develops a capital flow accounting framework to quantify the role of different factor market distortions in producing these patterns. Surprisingly, we find that distortions in labor markets ? rather than domestic or international capital markets ? account for the bulk of these flows. Labor market distortions that indirectly depress investment incentives by lowering equilibrium labor supply explain two-thirds of observed flows, while improvement in these distortions over time accounts for much of Asia?s rapid growth.

Keywords: Domestic capital markets; Capital flows; International capital markets; Labor markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E21 F21 F41 J20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 116 pages
Date: 2018-05-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-his, nep-lam, nep-lma, nep-mac, nep-opm and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr563.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Bad Investments and Missed Opportunities? Postwar Capital Flows to Asia and Latin America (2018)
Working Paper: Bad Investments and Missed Opportunities? Postwar Capital Flows to Asia and Latin America (2017)
Working Paper: Bad Investments and Missed Opportunities? Postwar Capital Flows to Asia and Latin America (2015)
Working Paper: Bad Investments and Missed Opportunities? Postwar Capital Flows to Asia and Latin America (2015)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedmsr:563

DOI: 10.21034/sr.563

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kate Hansel ().