Abstract

We propose an exogenous measure of a country's growth opportunities by interacting the country's local industry mix with global price to earnings (PE) ratios. First, we find that these exogenous growth opportunities strongly predict future changes in real GDP and investment in a large panel of countries. This relation is strongest in countries that have liberalized their capital accounts, equity markets, and banking systems. Second, we re-examine the link between financial development, external finance dependence, investor protection, capital allocation, and growth. We find that financial development, external finance dependence, and investor protection measures are much less important in aligning growth opportunities with growth than is capital market openness. Third, we formulate new tests of market integration and segmentation. Under integration, the difference between a country's local PE ratio and its global counterpart should not predict relative growth, but the difference between its exogenous global PE ratio and the world market PE ratio should predict relative growth.

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Citation

Bekaert, Geert, Campbell Harvey, Christian Lundblad, and Stephan Siegel. "Global Growth Opportunities and Market Integration." Working paper, Columbia University and NBER, 2004.

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