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Priests of Prosperityexplores the unsung revolutionary campaign to transform postcommunist central banks from command-economy cash cows into Western-style monetary guardians. Juliet Johnson conducted more than 160 interviews in seventeen countries with central bankers, international assistance providers, policymakers, and private-sector finance professionals over the course of fifteen years. She argues that a powerful transnational central banking community concentrated in Western Europe and North America integrated postcommunist central bankers into its network, shaped their ideas about the role of central banks, and helped them develop modern tools of central banking. Johnson's detailed comparative studies of central bank development in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan take readers from the birth of the campaign in the late 1980s to the challenges faced by central bankers after the global financial crisis. As the comfortable certainties of the past collapse around them, today's central bankers in the postcommunist world and beyond find themselves torn between allegiance to their transnational community and its principles on the one hand and their increasingly complex and politicized national roles on the other.Priests of Prosperitywill appeal to a diverse audience of scholars in political science, finance, economics, geography, and sociology as well as to central bankers and other policymakers interested in the future of international finance, global governance, and economic development.

In an era of financial globalization, cross-border capital flows hugely affect a country’s economic conditions, but their cyclical properties remain controversial. This paper takes terrorist attacks as exogenous shocks to study whether financial openness helps an economy recover from a crisis through inducing capital inflows, or amplifies the adverse effects by allowing for capital flight. With a panel dataset from 1990 to 2016, we show that cross-border capital flows are largely pro-cyclical, especially for non-OECD countries. A higher level of financial openness is associated with net capital outflows in response to terrorist incidents, mainly due to the decrease of the aggregate capital inflows by foreign investors. This mechanism also applies to disaggregate cross-border capital flows such as FDI, portfolio investment and debt investment. Furthermore, there is no sign that exchange rate adjustment insulates non-OECD countries from net capital outflows following a terrorist attack.

This work studies the effects that fiscal rules have on the probability of a sudden stop of net financial flows using data from 96 countries for the period 1985–2016. The estimates of several probit models show that fiscal rules could lower the probability of a sudden stop if they are formally enforced. Enforcement of supranational debt rules is important in lowering the likelihood of a country going through a sudden stop. I find that enforcement of supranational debt rules makes the countries that adhere to supranational debt rules less vulnerable to sudden stops by roughly 3.33 to 4.07 percentage points depending on the specifications. This could be due to an increase in the credibility of the country in the eyes of investors following the stronger commitment of the governments to adhere to these rules. These effects have been estimated using different specifications and models. The results are robust. On the other hand, I do not find enough statistically significant evidence regarding the effects of monitoring and well-defined escape clauses. The results about fiscal rules without taking these mechanisms into account indicate that fiscal rules on their own do not decrease the probability of a sudden stop. I find evidence that improvements in the current account balance, economic growth and institutional quality make a country less vulnerable to sudden stops, while a greater credit level, trade openness, and short term external debt increase the likelihood of a crisis. These estimates are in line with the sudden stop literature.

This paper estimates the impact of internal factors, such as governance institutions and financial development, versus external, such as capital flows uncertainty, on the excess savings of large emerging market economies (EMEs), identified as a major factor behind their trade surpluses. Using instrumental variables regression to control for endogeneity from institutions, we study eight major EMEs over 1995–2018 as well as a larger panel including both AEs and EMEs over 2001–2018 for robustness. Baseline estimates show that, along with financial development, democratic accountability and judiciary influence CA surpluses in both EMEs and AEs. Anti-corruption measures and government stability are influential specifically in AEs and EMEs respectively. For both EMEs and AEs, surpluses decrease with greater dependence on primary commodity exports supporting the “resource curse” thesis. That EME surpluses move negatively with better institutions and positively with capital flows uncertainty supports the precautionary motive. Sources of EME surpluses changed substantially from the pre- to the post-GFC years. During 2001–2008, higher growth, initial wealth, uncertainty in net capital flows increased surpluses. After 2008, reduced growth, lower CB intervention and better institutions rebalanced surpluses, particularly for Asia–Pacific nations.

Abstract Contrary to expectations, the global push for liberalizing reforms during the 1980s and 1990s did not abolish policy diversity in regard to capital flow management. Even though many countries fully opened their capital accounts, there remain several examples of divergence, which go from the maintenance of high levels of capital controls to partial liberalization. Against this background, relying on data from 84 countries between 1995 and 2017, this article uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to shed light on the conditions underlying different capital account regimes. In line with the Polanyian theoretical framework, findings reveal that two kinds of causal paths paved the way for intermediate regimes: the statist path was followed by right-leaning authoritarian regimes that attempted to combine the integration into global markets with the maintenance of control over the domestic private sector; the pluralist path was observed where either manufacturing industries or popular sectors were strong enough to motivate the reregulation of capital flows. Conversely, findings show that extreme regimes such as open and closed ones were associated with homogenous conditions like, respectively, leftist authoritarian regimes and rich democracies with stable economies.

One of the famous puzzles in macroeconomics, the Lucas (Am Econ Rev 80:92–96, 1990) paradox on “why doesn’t capital flow from rich to poor countries”, continues to exist and shapes capital flows in the modern world. This paper provides cross-country evidence on the role of politico-institutional and financial determinants in gross capital flows dynamics over the period 2000–2016. Using panel regressions incorporating country fixed effects, the study argues that institutional quality rather than the effect of diminishing returns of capital is a key explanation for the “Lucas Paradox”. It corroborates previous empirical evidence that government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and political stability remain the most important institutional indicators in determining gross capital flows dynamics, highlighting the symmetric effect. In contrast, voice and accountability, and corruption are not significant determinants of gross capital outflows dynamics. The main contribution of the paper comes in identifying the link between the multidimensional nature of financial development and gross capital flows. The empirical results highlight the significance of the differences in gross capital inflows/outflows depending on the country’s level of financial development. The study shows the significance and predominance of financial institutions versus financial markets in the dissemination of gross capital flows.

It has been argued that foreign direct investment can exert upward or downward pressure on the domestic interest rate depending on foreign investors’ relative weights on internal and external finance with respect to the domestic economy. Additionally, a country’s level of corruption can influence firms’ ability to obtain external finance. We find that across countries a 1 percent increase in FDI inflows (outflows) is more likely to reduce the domestic interest rate by as much as 0.7 (1) percent. This empirical association between domestic interest rates and FDI flows is non-monotonically contingent on a country’s level of corruption.

Chinaʼs comprehensive administrative system for capital controls and ongoing capital liberalisation are unique features compared with other emerging economies. These allow us to investigate the effects of Chinaʼs capital controls and subsequent liberalisation policies, along with various global-push and domestic-pull factors, on its gross capital flows in a time series analysis. We collect various sources of information on Chinaʼs capital control policies from 2005 to 2022 and construct quarterly time series of Chinaʼs capital control indices for different types of gross flows. Using the bounds tests of cointegration and a conditional error-correction model, we show that Chinaʼs capital account liberalisation successfully encourages foreignersʼ investments aiming at production to maintain a long-term relationship with China, as well as their short-term financial investments to China. On the other hand, Chinese residents increase their long-term investments overseas during the liberalisation process. However, their portfolio investments abroad are not responsive to the relaxation of capital controls.

Illicit financial flows constitute a global phenomenon of massive but uncertain scale, which erodes government revenues and drives corruption in countries rich and poor. In 2015, the countries of the world committed to a target to reduce illicit flows, as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. But five years later, there is still no agreement on how that target should be monitored—to say nothing of how it will be achieved. The term ‘illicit financial flows’ covers a range of corrupt practices, aimed at obtaining immunity or impunity from criminal law, from market regulation and from taxation. Illicit flows occur through many different channels, whether they involve laundering the proceeds of crime, for example, or shifting the profits of multinational companies. There are two consistent features. First, illicit flows are deliberately hidden. These cross-border movements of assets and income streams depend on a set of common tools including opaque company accounts, legal vehicles for anonymous ownership, and the secrecy jurisdictions that provide these services. Second, the overall effect of illicit flows is to reduce the revenue available to states, and to weaken the quality of governance—so there is less money to support human development, and it is less likely to be spent well. In this book, two of the economists most closely involved in the process to develop UN indicators of illicit financial flows offer a critical survey of the existing data and methodologies, identifying the most promising avenues for future improvement and setting out their own proposals.

Against the backdrop of a 20-year revolt against free trade orthodoxy by economists inside the UN and their impact on policy discussions since the 1960s, the authors show how the UN both nurtured and inhibited creative and novel intellectual contributions to the trade and development debate. Presenting a stirring account of the main UN actors in this debate, The UN and Global Political Economy focuses on the accomplishments and struggles of UN economists and the role played by such UN agencies as the Department of Economic (and Social) Affairs, the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development, and the Economic Commission for Latin America (and the Caribbean). It also looks closely at the effects of the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the growing strength of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the 1990s, and the lessons to be drawn from these and other recent developments.