This paper examines the distributional impact of capital account liberalization. Using panel data for 149 countries from 1970 to 2010, we find that, on average, capital account liberalization reforms increase inequality and reduce the labor share of income in the short and medium term. We also find that the level of financial development and the occurrence of crises play a key role in shaping the response of inequality to capital account liberalization reforms.

The opening of capital account of an economy allows the financially constrained local firms to attract and raise cost efficient capital from abroad in one hand and on the other hand allows the well performing and financially solvent local firms to go out other countries and avail the external economics of scale, low-cost factors of production and explore new markets. Since capital and skilled labor are relative complements, the opening of capital account could result in a higher income inequality between the skilled and unskilled labor classes. To present some pieces of evidence in this regard, a panel data set with secondary data of 11 Asia-Pacific countries have been analyzed by applying the general panel data analysis techniques and GMM model for both de jure and de facto measures. It has been found that the capital account liberalization (CAL) would increase the incomes more of skilled labor working in the industries than the unskilled labor.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Politics - General and Theories of International Politics, grade: 1,0, , course: Maastricht Graduate School of Governance, language: English, abstract: Observing an increasing financial liberalization and income inequality during the last decades, this study investigates how the opening of financial markets is influencing income inequality. Operationalizing the research question, it focuses on capital account liberalization (CAL). The paper begins with an extensive literature review which recognizes the importance of a countries institutional quality and derives the following two hypotheses: CAL generally increases income inequality and CAL leads to an especially high increase in income inequality if the institutional quality is low. These hypotheses are empirically tested based on a panel data set covering 159 countries from 1996 – 2009. In the last decades the economies and financial systems of many countries liberalized and integrated with each other in order to benefit economically. However, at the same time income inequality and the gap between the extreme poor and the rich increased. The European Union is one of the regions with the most remarkable development regarding financial liberalization and integration. Some countries have been transformed within the last 25 years from centrally planned economies with controlled financial markets to market economies with open financial markets, integrated within the European Monetary Union. On the one hand this financial liberalization and integration is argued to be an important reason for economic growth. However, on the other hand it is strongly related to the Euro currency crises which is currently the main challenge facing the EU and is discussed daily on the news. The lower- and middle-classes in particular are protesting against immense financial supports for banks and investors on the one side and wage reductions, unemployment and social benefit cuts on the other. Can these inequalities be explained by the increasing liberalization of financial markets? Are they logical consequences of international financial liberalization and integration? This paper approaches these questions on a meta-level by answering the research question: How is Financial Market Liberalization Influencing Income Inequality? Before elaborating on this research question and explaining the investigated hypotheses it is explained what exactly is meant by financial market liberalization.

This study examines the relationship between capital account liberalisation and income inequality. Adopting a novel identification strategy, namely a difference-in-difference estimation combined with propensity score matching between the liberalised and closed countries, we provide robust evidence that opening the capital account is associated with an adverse impact on income inequality in developing countries. The main findings are threefold. First, fully liberalising the capital account is associated with a small rise of 0.07-0.30 standard deviations in the Gini coefficient in the short-run and a rise as large as 0.32-0.62 standard deviations in the ten years after liberalisation, on average. Second, widening income inequality is the outcome of the growing income share of the rich at the cost of the poor. The long-term effect of capital account liberalisation includes a reduction in the income share of the poorest half by 2.66-3.79 percentage points and an increase in the income share of the richest 10% by 5.19-8.76 percentage points. Third, the directions and categories of capital account liberalisation matter. Inward capital account liberalisation is more detrimental to income equality than outward capital account liberalisation, and free access to the international equity market exacerbates income inequality the most, while foreign direct investment has an insignificant impact on inequality.

Recently, capital controls have made a comeback as both policymakers and academia have questioned the net benefits of liberalization and economic growth, especially after the 2008 Great Recession. While that literature has largely concluded that capital account liberalization may have detrimental effects on growth and accentuate financial instability in emerging markets, relatively little literature has examined the impacts of capital account liberalization on income inequality. Thus, this paper investigates the extent to which liberalization is beneficial for countries, conditional on institutional strength and financial depth. We specifically explore the differential impacts of capital account liberalization on income inequality during periods of economic expansion and contraction. The main findings suggest that the net impact of financial liberalization on income inequality is ambiguous during periods of economic expansion but detrimental during contractions. However, we also find that capital account openness needs not to be detrimental on income inequality if institutions are strong or - as it is the case in Latin America - if social safety nets are available.

"Writings on the macroeconomic impact of capital account liberalization find few, if any, robust effects of liberalization on real variables. In contrast to the prevailing wisdom, I argue that the textbook theory of liberalization holds up quite well to a critical reading of this literature. The lion's share of papers that find no effect of liberalization on real variables tell us nothing about the empirical validity of the theory, because they do not really test it. This paper explains why it is that most studies do not really address the theory they set out to test. It also discusses what is necessary to test the theory and examines papers that have done so. Studies that actually test the theory show that liberalization has significant effects on the cost of capital, investment, and economic growth"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.