Financial integration and economic growth: directional heterogeneity and threshold effect

Abstract

Despite voluminous studies, the growth effects of international financial integration remain unresolved. Recent studies have shown that the effects depend on a wide variety of factors including the level of economic and financial development, the type of financial flows (debt or equity), the direction of flows (inflows or outflows), and the existence of the investment or saving constraint with the economy. In this paper, we implement a model that embodies double threshold effects where the thresholds are defined in terms of (i) per capita GDP and (ii) the economic growth rate. The results support the single threshold of the growth rate, which is expected to capture the existence of the investment or saving constraint with the economy. We find that developed and slowly developing economies are likely to benefit from capital outflows for higher investment incomes whereas emerging economies with growth rate higher than 3.4—5.7 percent can successfully take advantage of financial integration and resulting capital inflows. The findings are robust to changes in variable definition, model specification and data selection.