Contrary to the predictions of standard economic theory, capital market liberalization has been a mixed blessing for many countries. Liberalization of debt inflows exposes economies to the risk of crises stemming from sudden changes in investor sentiment. Equity market liberalizations, on the other hand, have promoted growth in almost every liberalizing country. Yet equity market liberalization...

The majority of OECD countries has experienced a reduction in macroeconomic volatility during the last two decades. This period is also characterized by a gradual liberalization of the capital accounts of from these countries. The goal of this paper is to study whether capital markets liberalization can lead to lower macroeconomic volatility. We study a business cycle model with multiple countr...

Does trade liberalization foster total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the manufacturing sector? Does sectoral trade orientation determine sectoral TFP levels and growth rates? These questions are addressed using pooled pre-and post-liberalization panel data from Cameroonian firms of eight manufacturing industries. A single production function for the whole manufacturing sector is estimated...

This paper questions the conventional wisdom concerning the sequencing of political and economic reforms in developing countries. We exploit the specific situation of frontier-zones as well as the considerable regional variations in culture and economic development in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in order to estimate the impact of market development an...

Why does the current wave of globalization create more public concern/opposition than previous rounds of trade liberalization? This paper identifies a key difference between globalization and trade liberalization that could be responsible for it. It is shown that while both globalization and trade liberalization create inter-sector income distribution, the former also creates intra-sector incom...

 Trade liberalization is often the core attention of foreign economic strategies in developing countries. Findings in the literature confirm a significant effect of free trade on developing economies through which the economic sectors benefit from technology transfer and spillovers and increasing production capacities and input productivity leading to international competitiveness. On the other...

One of the most controversial aspects of globalization is capital-market liberalization—not so much the liberalization of rules governing foreign direct investment, but those affecting short-term capital flows, speculative hot capital that can come into and out of a country. In the 1980s and 1990s, the IMF and the US Treasury tried to push capital-market liberalization around the world, encount...