ABSTRACT
The role of international factor mobility in shaping the evolution of the modern world economy has not followed any simple linear trend. While its heyday was undoubtedly in the belle epoque of the 1870–1913 period, when not only did Europeans colonize the world but tens of millions of Indians and Chinese moved about the less developed regions in their wake under the aegis of their empires, it has revived markedly again after experiencing a severe decline in the 1930s and 1940s as a result of depression and world war. The revival of capital mobility, however, has been much more evident than that of labour, despite the phenomena of the ‘brain drains’ and the flow of refugees generated by ethnic and other tensions in the newly independent states of the Third World.
