As Figure 9 demonstrates, while in the last 25 years the share of industrialised countries in world trade gradually declined, their share in cross-border financial positions quickly increased. But growth rate gaps are just one aspect of the story behind these uneven advances in trade and financial globalisation.
Another, perhaps more important, one was the fact that developed countries engaged in rapid innovation in the field of financial products, allowing them to channel domestic and global savings more efficiently towards productive investments, while emerging countries remained openly sceptical about this process. Two of the most striking developments in recent decades in this respect occurred in credit default swaps (CDSs) and securitised products.