Theory suggests different channels through which financial integration can
positively affect investment and growth. Despite the theoretical case for capital
account liberalisation, attempts at establishing a robust empirical link between
financial openness and growth have so far not been very successful. However, one
should be cautious in interpreting the lack of a strong statistical link as evidence
against liberalisation. As noted earlier, it may be that the measures of capital
account liberalisation employed in most studies, including this one, do not
adequately capture complex phenomena like financial liberalisation. Attempts at
identifying the conditions under which liberalisation might be beneficial have also
been hampered by the lack of satisfactory measures of financial market
development and institutional strength. To complement the existing research, we
examine this issue by using the available data on capital flows instead of the
measures of capital account liberalisation. Consistent with conventional wisdom,
we find that foreign direct investment and portfolio inflows enhance growth. By
contrast, bank inflows appear to have a negative effect on growth, although this
result is less robust to changes in equation specification than the results for FDI
and portfolio inflows. Future work should attempt to more closely identify the
different channels through which capital flows affect growth.