Global Financial Centers, Economic Power, and (In)Efficiency

This book scrutinizes global financial flows and stocks, both financial assets and liabilities and their impact on the global balance of economic power, especially as they affect the largest and fastest-growing countries in both the developed and the developing world. It shows how financial flows can promote economic growth and financial capital can serve as a tool for higher growth rates in emerging market economies, but also that the huge amounts of financial capital currently being spent in advanced countries to promote economic growth has produced at best very modest improvements and in some cases negative results.

The book opens with an analysis of global capital flows and their concentration. It then offers an analysis of rates of relative economic growth (or decline). The final section deals with the (decreasing) economic efficiency of financial flows and the (un)sustainability of economic growth, especially during the past eight years of economic recovery. Tackling oneof the most serious problems in the global economy today, this book will be of interest to academics, researchers, and students of capital markets, financial crisis, and financial economics.

Fikret Čaušević is a Professor of Economics and Finance at the School of Economics and Business, University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2002, 2006, 2007, and 2010 he was a Visiting Fellow under the South East Europe Faculty Development Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. In the 2011-2012 academic year, Čaušević was the SEESOX Alpha Bank Visiting Fellow at St Antony's College, University of Oxford, UK. Over the last decade, he has written extensively about economic transition in the world, South-East Europe, the Western Balkans, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.