Latin America had the highest tariffs in the world before 1914; Asia had the lowest. Heavily protected Latin America also boasted some of the most explosive <italic>belle époque</italic> growth, while open Asia registered some of the least. What brought the two regions to the opposite ends of the tariff policy...

This paper uses a new database to establish a set of tariff facts that have not been well appreciated: tariff rates in Latin America were far higher than anywhere else in the century before the Great Depression; while lower than Latin America, tariffs were far higher in the European periphery...

Why do rich countries receive the lion's share of international investment flows? Although this "wealth bias" is strong today, it was even stronger during the first global capital market boom before 1913. Very little of British capital exports went to poor countries, whether colonies or not....