Impacts of financial openness on economic complexity: Cross-country evidence

Few studies are found to examine the relationship between financial openness and economic complexity. Using a panel data of 120 economies during 1996-2016, this paper aims to examine the impact of financial openness, human capital, institutional quality, banking industry concentration, and other factors on economic complexity. We establish dynamic panel models that incorporate lagged-dependent variables and employ the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) for estimation. Our pooled-sample regression results show that the enhancement of overall financial openness could increase the economic complexity significantly, as well as de-facto and de-jure openness. The subsample regressions indicate heterogeneous impacts of financial openness depending on country groups and industry. Besides, there exists significant path dependence for ECI improvement, which is more prominent in high-income countries. For low- and middle-income countries, greater GVC participation and lower banking concentration can promote ECI improvement significantly.