An economic survey of international capital mobility from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Maurice Obstfeld is the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His interests are in international finance and macroeconomics, areas in which he has published numerous research articles. Professor Obstfeld received his Ph.D. from MIT and later taught at Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard before moving to Berkeley. He has served as a consultant for the IMF, World Bank, European Commission, and several central banks. With Kenneth Rogoff, he is the author of Foundations of International Macroeconomics (1996). He is also the author, together with Paul Krugman, of International Economics: Theory and Policy, which has been translated into several foreign languages. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London), and a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

Part I. Preamble; Section 1. Global Capital Markets: Overview and Origins: 1. Theoretical benefits; 2. Problems of supernational capital markets in practice; 3. The emergence of world capital markets; 4. The trilemma: capital mobility, the exchange rate, and monetary policy; Part II. Global Capital in Modern Historical Perspective; Section 2. Globalization in Capital Markets: Quantity Evidence: 5. The stocks of foreign capital; 6 The size of international flows; 7. The saving-investment relationship; 8. Caveats: quantity criteria; Section 3. Globalization in Capital Markets: Price Evidence: 9. Real interest rate convergence; 10. Exchange-risk free nominal interest parity; 11. Purchasing power parity; 12. Caveats: price criteria; 13. Summary; Part III. The Political Economy of Capital Mobility; Section 4. Globalization in Capital Markets: A Long-Run Narrative: 14. Capital without constraints: the gold standard, 1870-1931; 15. Crisis and compromise: depression and war, 1931-46; 16. Containment then collapse: Bretton Woods, 1946-71; 17. Crisis and compromise II: the floating era, 1971-99; 18. Measuring financial integration using data on legal restrictions; Section 5. The Trilemma in History: 19. Methodology; 20. Data sources; 21. Stationarity of nominal interest rates; 22. Empirical findings: pooled annual differences; 23. Empirical findings: individual-country dynamics; 24. Conclusion; Section 6. Sovereign Risk, Credibility and the Gold Standard: 25. Five suggestive cases; 26. Econometric analysis; 27. Conclusion; Part IV. Lessons for Today; Section 7. Uneven Rewards: 28. Foreign capital stocks: net versus gross; 29. Foreign capital flows: rich versus poor; 30. Foreign capital stocks: rich versus poor; 31. Then: has foreign capital always been biased to the rich?; 32. Now: have poor countries really liberalized their markets?; 33. Variations in the types of capital flows; 34. Summary; Section 8. Uneven Risks: 35. Open markets, crises and volatility; 36. Crises, controls and economic performance; 37. Contagion and self-fulfilling crises; 38. Market failure, government failure and policy choices.