Are Financial Development and Trade Openness Complements or Substitutes?

This article studies the long- and short-run relationships between financial development and trade openness. Using the pooled mean group estimator of Pesaran, Shin, and Smith (1999) for unbalanced panel data for 87 countries over the 1960–2005 period, our empirical results indicate that long-run complementarity between financial development and trade openness coexists with short-run substitutionarity between the two policy variables. But when splitting the data into OECD and non-OECD country groups, this finding can be observed only in non- OECD countries. For OECD countries, financial development has negligible effects on trade. In addition, we find nonlinearity in the relationship in that long-run responses of trade decrease with financial development. The article further finds coexistence of negative trade effects of financial fragility and positive trade impacts of financial depth.