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Financial Constraints, The Distribution Of Wealth And International Trade, Emmanuel Amissah, Spiros Bougheas, Rodney Falvey

Rodney Falvey

Extract:

As the Heckscher-Ohlin-Mundell paradigm predicts, in a world where capital markets are perfect and production exhibits constant-returns to scale, while aggregate wealth endowments can be an important source of comparative advantage, their internal distribution does not matter for the patterns of international trade. This is because in the absence of financial frictions the only factor that determines the availability of external finance is a project's net present value. In real life financial markets are far from perfect. Informational asymmetries between lenders and borrowers, corporate governance quality shortcomings and non-negligible intermediation costs are only a sample of the types of …