Abstract: We study the impact of the last five decades of financial globalization on world GDP and income distribution, employing a novel multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model that embeds a demand system for international assets. We introduce, estimate and validate new country-level measures of inward and outward Revealed Capital Account Openness (RKO), which are derived from wedge accounting. The implementation of our framework requires only minimal data, which is available as early as 1970 (national income accounts, external assets and liabilities positions). Our RKO wedges reveal enormous heterogeneity in the pace of capital account liberalization, with richer countries liberalizing much faster than poorer ones. We call this pattern Unbalanced Financial Globalization. We then utilize our model to simulate a counterfactual trajectory of the global economy, where the RKO wedges are fixed at their pre-globalization levels. We find that unbalanced financial globalization led to a worsening of capital allocation (lowering world GDP by 1.4%), a 10% rise in the cross-country dispersion of GDP per capita, lower wages in poorer countries and lower cost of capital in high-income countries. These findings stand in sharp contrast to the predictions of standard models of financial markets integration, where capital account barriers decline symmetrically across countries. We also study counterfactual globalization patterns where countries open their capital account in a symmetric or convergent fashion, and find that these scenarios produce diametrically opposite effects (significant improvements in capital allocation efficiency and lower cross-country inequality, higher wages in poor countries, etc..). These findings underscore the pivotal role played by country heterogeneity in shaping the real effects of capital markets integration.