The Financial Protectionism-Financial Integration Dilemma through Capital Mobility: Economic Performance vs Financial Crises

In this paper, a theoretical and an empirical discussion of the post-crisis supremacy of financial integration over financial protectionism are proposed. The debate is done through a survey of the advantages each line of thinking brings about to improve economic performance and reduce crisis probability or its magnitude. Moreover, in this paper we study the impact of financial integration through capital mobility on economic growth of a sample of emerging countries. The contribution of our paper is the use of a number of capital mobility openness measures. Thus, we propose to test whether this impact varies with the used measure, the time period and the sample of selected countries. We adopted a panel data analysis technique proposed by Arellano and Bond. With reference to the different estimations conducted, we can conclude that the impact of capital mobility liberalization on economic growth depends on the openness indicator or measure used, the sample of countries studied and the time period examined.