This book presents an economic history of international capital mobility in the modern era. It blends narrative and quantitative methods and connects economic outcomes to the underlying political economy of international macroeconomics. The volume demonstrates that the recent globalization can be seen, in part, as the resumption of a liberal world order that had previously been established in the years 1880-1914, but also points out that much is different in terms of its causes and consequences.

Despite the successes achieved in liberalizing trade by multilateral trade negotiations sponsored by the World Trade Organization (WTO), numerous countries have separately negotiated preferential trade treaties with one another. Representing a significant departure from the WTO's central principle of non-discrimination among member countries, preferential trade blocs are the subject of an intense academic and policy debate. The first section of this 2005 book presents a rudimentary and intuitive introduction to the economics of preferential trade agreements. The following chapters present the...