Evolving Financial Markets
and International Capital Flows
This study examines the
impact of British capital flows on the evolution of capital markets in four countries -
Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the United States - over the years 1870 to 1914. In
substantive chapters on each country it offers parallel histories of the evolution of
their financial infrastructures - commercial banks, non-bank intermediaries, primary
security markets, formal secondary security markets, and the institutions that provide the
international financial links connecting the frontier country with the British capital
market. At one level, the work constitutes a quantitative history of the development of
the capital markets of five countries in the late nineteenth century. At a second level,
it provides the basis for a useable taxonomy for the study of institutional invention and
innovation. At a third, it suggests some lessons from the past about modern policy issues.
This monumental book by Lance
Davis and the late Robert Gallman is a valuable tool for the student of the globalization
of capital markets. Davis and Gallman expertly analyze the dimensions, institutions, and
mechanisms of the massive flow of funds that went from British savers to finance the
development of the economies of the nations of new settlement: Argentina, Australia,
Canada and the United States, in the Golden Age from 1890-1914. Their main thesis is that
institutional innovation to overcome the problems of asymmetric information, manifest in
different forms in each of the four capital recipients, was crucial to the successful
mobilization of the British capital inflows. This perspective distinguishes this book from
its predecessors.
- Michael D. Bordo, Rutgers
University
Davis and Gallman have
provided a huge compendium of information and analysis. They show how powerful this kind
of history is for an understanding of the development of the international capital
markets. A brilliant picture.
- Forrest Capie, City
University Business School, UK
Lance Davis and the late
Robert Gallman have written an outstanding study of the relationship between the
importation of British capital by Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the United States -
the four countries of new settlement - during 1865-1914 and the accompanying redesign of
their domestic financial structures. Individual chapters devoted to the supplier of
capital and each of the country demanders enormously expand the scope of our knowledge of
both financial markets and international capital flows. The study draws lessons based on
the historical evidence, sketches the evolution of the world's financial markets since
1914, and then examines contemporary problems in Japan and developing economies in Latin
America and Asia.
- Anna J. Schwartz, National
Bureau of Economic Research
Contents
1. Institutional invention
and innovation: foreign capital transfers and the evolution of the domestic capital
markets in four frontier countries: Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the United States of
America, 1865-1914
2. The United Kingdom
3. International capital
movements, domestic capital markets, and American economic growth, 1865-1914
4. Domestic savings,
international capital flows, and the evolution of domestic capital markets: the Canadian
experience
5. Domestic saving,
international capital flows, and the evolution of domestic capital markets: the Australian
experience
6. Argentine savings,
investment, and economic growth before World War I
7. Lessons from the past:
international financial flows and the evolution of capital markets, Britain and Argentina,
Australia, Canada, and the United States before World War I
8. Skipping ahead: the
evolution of the world's finance markets 1914-1990: a brief sketch
9. Lessons from the past
Bibliography
986 pages