Capital Flows and Macroeconomic Performance: Lessons from the Golden Era of International Finance

This paper analyzes the relationship between capital ‡ows and returns during the “golden era”of international ‡ows from 1880 –1913 and the interwar period from 1918 –1938. We construct two measures of returns in a country based on, alternatively, the marginal product of capital, and on consumption growth. Our main …nding is that ‡ows during the golden era are indeed consistent with standard theory, as capital ‡ows from low to high return countries when returns are measured from consumption growth. However, this relationship breaks down during the interwar period. When returns are measured from the marginal product of capital, there is no tendency for capital to ‡ow from low to high return countries during the golden era, a …nding that is quite similar to the main …ndings in our analysis of the postwar period (Ohanian and Wright 2008). This paper was prepared for the January 2010 meetings of the American Economics Association in Atlanta. Ohanian: Department of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles, Box 951477, Los Angeles, CA 90095-147703, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and NBER, [email protected]. Wright: Department of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles, Box 951477, Los Angeles, CA 90095-147703, [email protected]. We thank Kanda Naknoi for comments, Atika Sanchetee for help with the data, and Jose Ignacio Lopez for excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or of the Federal Reserve System. 1 Introduction Where does international capital ‡ow? Robert E. Lucas, Jr. (1990) asked why capital did not ‡ow from rich countries to poor, developing, countries implicitly assuming that returns to capital in developing countries were higher than those in the developed world. Lee E. Ohanian and Mark L.J. Wright (2008) measured capital ‡ows and rates of return over the last 50 years to assess whether capital indeed ‡owed from low return countries to high return countries. We found that capital ‡ows for much of the post-World War II period are the reverse of the ‡ows predicted by theory. That is, capital has tended to ‡ow to countries with relatively low returns, rather than high returns. This paper analyzes where capital ‡owed during the “golden era”of international ‡ows from 1880 –1913, when capital mobility is considered to have been quite high, and during the interwar period from 1918 –1938, when capital ‡ows were increasingly restricted following the First World War and the Great Depression. We evaluate the relationship between capital ‡ows and di¤erences in returns to investment across countries using the same methodology as in our earlier paper. We construct two measures of the level of returns in a country and compare these returns to observed capital ‡ows. The …rst return measure, based on the marginal product of capital, is constructed using a Cobb-Douglas technology and measured from the observed capital-output ratio. The second return measure is based on observed consumption growth, which is the return to capital when consumers have log preferences over consumption, and which otherwise is a good proxy for the return for the class of constant relative risk aversion utility functions. Our main …nding is that ‡ows during the golden era are indeed consistent with standard theory, as capital ‡ows from low to high return countries when returns are measured from consumption growth. However, this relationship breaks down during the interwar period. When returns are measured from the marginal product of capital, there is no tendency for capital to ‡ow from low to high return countries during the golden era, a …nding that is quite similar to the main …ndings in our analysis of the postwar period. This failure of capital ‡ows to line up with the marginal product of capital suggests quantitatively important domestic factors that drive a sizeable wedge between net returns and the marginal product of capital. Our paper is related to a large literature that has studied capital ‡ows during the golden era and interwar periods. Most of these studies have built on research by Martin Feldstein and Charles Y. Horioka (1980) who analyzed cross-country data and showed that there is a high correlation between investment and savings across countries in postwar data. Feldstein and Horioka interpreted this high correlation as suggesting highly imperfect capital markets. Research in this tradition for the golden era includes Tamim Bayoumi (1990), Barry Eichgengreen (1992), Alan M. Taylor (1996), and Maurice Obstfeld and Taylor (2004), all of whom examine the correlation between savings and investment during the mid-late 1800s through the early 1900s, and compare those estimates to those from other time periods. A common …nding in these studies is that there was a weaker correlation between savings and investment during the golden era of ‡ows than during the interwar period and much of the postwar period. The interpretation of this …nding is that there were signi…cantly fewer impediments to capital mobility during the golden era than during other times. But even if there were fewer impediments to international capital ‡ows during this golden era, the literature in the style of Feldstein and Horioka is silent on whether capital ‡owed to those countries that should have been the importers of capital, as predicted by standard theory. This paper sheds new light on capital ‡ows during this time period by directly addressing this question. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we present an open-economy growth model in which returns may di¤er across countries as the result of (possibly very small) frictions in the operations of markets and derive conditions under which capital should ‡ow from low return to high return countries in equilibrium. Section 3 describes our dataset, Section 4 presents our results, and Section 5 concludes. 2 Model Our analysis is based on a simple open-economy version of the deterministic neoclassical growth model, in which the representative consumers in each country have identical