A number of issues deserve investigation in future research. One concerns a better
understanding of the channels through which financial openness affects per-capita
income catching up. Several theoretical possibilities exist and our empirical analysis
indicates that financial openness does not produce its impact only through the
development of domestic financial systems and a faster accumulation of physical
capital. A more structural model is therefore needed to disentangle between other
possible transmission mechanisms. Future work should also consider whether, in
addition to the two considered in this paper, financial openness affects other
dimensions of economic integration, such as the sustainability of fixed exchange rate
regimes and the rate of nominal convergence. Finally, it would be interesting to assess
how the effects of financial openness on economic integration change across different
clusters of countries. This requires re-estimation for sample of countries selected
along different criteria (i.e. membership in a given regional economic community,
initial level of per-capita income, etc.) and compare the estimated strength of the
relationship between financial openness and economic integration dimensions.
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