Private Capital Flows and Economic Development: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of Asian and Latin American Countries

After the 1980s debt crisis had officially come to an end, most developing nations in Asia and Latin America successfully reentered the global capital market. Private capital flows into these regions surged to unprecedented heights. Present paper gives an overview of what gave rise to this sudden come-back of external finance to the developing world, why its composition and geographical dispersion had changed, and how it affected the macroeconomic environment of the recipient nation. Furthermore, a cross-section econometric analysis is applied to thirty-four countries for the early 1990s, to determine the effect of private inflows on the growth rate of real GDP, as a proxy for economic development, in the context of a standard neoclassical growth equation framework. Results confirm the favorable impact of portfolio investment, but foreign direct investment appears to hinder economic growth. An attempt is made to interpret these results and compare them with existing empirical research.