4 摘要：Treating finance as a tradable service, this paper examines how global current account imbalances can emerge as a result of the Ricardian comparative advantage in finance and manufacturing. The financial sector screens borrowers to limit its risk exposure when it invests in manufacturing firms born with heterogeneous risks. As a result, a country with a relatively higher productivity in the financial sector tends to specialize in providing financial services to both domestic and foreign firms. In a dynamic growth model, we explicitly show that this country tends to persistently run current account deficits. In contrast, a country with the manufacturing comparative advantage tends to persistently run current account surpluses. The scale of global imbalances increases as the comparative advantage gets stronger. Our empirical tests with panel data of OECD countries provide consistent and robust supports to these theoretical claims.
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