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What Makes Capital Account Regulation Effective? Comparing the Experiences of Brazil, Peru, and Iceland
Abstract
Empirical studies confirm that the impact of capital account regulation (CAR) is highly case-specific, which underlines the need to identify the determinants of CAR effectiveness in greater depth. Coming from a political economy perspective, this article aims to contribute to this subject by comparing three experiences of intense regulation: Brazil (2008-2013), Peru (2008-2013), and Iceland (2008-2017). The main result encountered is that the bargaining power of the different sectors involved in regulation represents a crucial factor in explaining the impact of this policy. Furthermore, domestic banks play an important role in the effectiveness of capital account regulation.
... (Kaltenbrunner and Painceira, 2015). Other countries in the region, such as Peru, recognized these vulnerabilities and prohibited non-residents from investment in central bank short-term liabilities used for monetary policy implementation (Aguirre and Alonso, 2020). This leads us to the third and largest vulnerability of the deregulated financial regime of Macri's administration: the persistent dollarization of residents' savings, both elites and middle class. ...
After returning to financial markets in 2016, Argentina asked for IMF financing in 2018 and defaulted on its peso‐denominated short‐term debt in 2019. This article describes this latest short‐lived cycle of external indebtedness and default. The Macri administration that came into power in December 2015 embarked on a path of financial liberalization, external indebtedness, rising public utility tariffs and increased profitability in the agricultural sector, with the aim of lowering inflation, attracting foreign direct investment and promoting economic growth. Vulnerabilities arose because of the combination of financial deregulation, external indebtedness in foreign currency, inflows of volatile short‐term financial capital, capital flight by domestic residents, and the government's flawed reaction to a currency crisis in 2018. The IMF programme failed to attack the causes of the crisis, while plunging the country into a severe recession and a debt default. Notwithstanding the successful renegotiation of external debt with private creditors in 2020, the new Argentinian administration still faces serious challenges if it is to lift the economy out of stagnation.
Presents the results of a survey applied to Brazilian diplomats and other former and current international cooperation professionals regarding the effects on Foreign Policy of changes in Brazil's support to international cooperation for development.
Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience interested in economic policy issues. This Web-only series replaced Staff Position Notes in January 2011.
Brazil sailed well through the global financial storm, using counter-cyclical policies to engineer its fast V-shaped recovery in 2010. In order to deal with inflationary pressures arising from its strong recovery, after the peak of the crisis, it used standard aggregate demand management instruments (tight fiscal and monetary policies). Brazil had also to deal with the post-QE global environment of excess liquidity in 2010-2011 where excessive capital inflows were exacerbating domestic credit growth with potentially destabilizing effects for price and financial stability. In that front, Brazil maintained and strengthened its strong financial sector regulation and supervision to continue to ensure financial stability, in particular, using a set of macroprudential instruments. While combining monetary and macroprudential instruments to lean against the financial cycle, the Central Bank of Brazil has always made clear that macroprudential measures are not a substitute for monetary policy action and are primarily geared at addressing financial stability risks. In fact, many policy makers after the global financial crisis seem to see now a complementarity between macroprudential measures and monetary policy. Accordingly, the (new) separation principle seems to evolve into using two instruments (the central bank’s base rate and a set of macroprudential tools) to address two objectives (the inflation target and a composite set of financial stability indicators). Brazil’s recent experience with monetary and macroprudential policies is a successful example of this new approach. More time and other countries’ experiences are needed to assess properly if this policy option can be generalized and replicated with similar results elsewhere.
This paper reviews policy tools that have been used and/or are available for policy makers in the region to lean against the wind and review relevant country experiences using them. The instruments examined include: (i) capital requirements, dynamic provisioning, and leverage ratios; (ii) liquidity requirements; (iii) debt-to-income ratios; (iv) loan-to-value ratios; (v) reserve requirements on bank liabilities (deposits and nondeposits); (vi) instruments to manage and limit systemic foreign exchange risk; and, finally, (vii) reserve requirements or taxes on capital inflows. Although the instruments analyzed are mainly microprudential in nature, appropriately calibrated over the financial cycle they may serve for macroprudential purposes.
Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, "this time is different"--claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. With this breakthrough study, leading economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff definitively prove them wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much--or how little--we have learned. Using clear, sharp analysis and comprehensive data, Reinhart and Rogoff document that financial fallouts occur in clusters and strike with surprisingly consistent frequency, duration, and ferocity. They examine the patterns of currency crashes, high and hyperinflation, and government defaults on international and domestic debts--as well as the cycles in housing and equity prices, capital flows, unemployment, and government revenues around these crises. While countries do weather their financial storms, Reinhart and Rogoff prove that short memories make it all too easy for crises to recur. An important book that will affect policy discussions for a long time to come, This Time Is Different exposes centuries of financial missteps.
There is growing dissatisfaction with the economic policies advocated by the IMF and other international financial institutions - policies that have often resulted in stagnating growth, crises, and recessions for client countries. This book presents an alternative to "Washington Consensus" neo-liberal economic policies by showing that both macro-economic and liberalization policy must be sensitive to the particular circumstances of developing countries. One-size-fits-all policy prescriptions are likely to fail given the vast differences between countries. This book discusses how alternative approaches to economic policy can better serve developing countries both in ordinary times and in times of crisis. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0199288143/toc.html
This paper examines the macroeconomic implications of and policy responses to surges in private capital inflows across a large group of emerging and advanced economies. In particular, we identify 109 episodes of large net private capital inflows to 52 countries over 1987-2007. Episodes of large capital inflows are often associated with real exchange rate appreciations and deteriorating current account balances. More importantly, such episodes tend to be accompanied by an acceleration of GDP growth, but afterwards growth has often dropped significantly. A comprehensive assessment of various policy responses to the large inflow episodes leads to three major conclusions. First, keeping public expenditure growth steady during episodes can help limit real currency appreciation and foster better growth outcomes in their aftermath. Second, resisting nominal exchange rate appreciation through sterilized intervention is likely to be ineffective when the influx of capital is persistent. Third, tightening capital controls has not in general been associated with better outcomes.
The literature on capital controls has (at least) four very serious apples-to-oranges problems: (i) There is no unified theoretical framework to analyze the macroeconomic consequences of controls; (ii) there is significant heterogeneity across countries and time in the control measures implemented; (iii) there are multiple definitions of what constitutes a “success” and (iv) the empirical studies lack a common methodology—furthermore these are significantly “overweighted” by a couple of country cases (Chile and Malaysia). In this paper, we attempt to address some of these shortcomings by: being very explicit about what measures are construed as capital controls. Also, given that success is measured so differently across studies, we sought to “standardize” the results of over 30 empirical studies we summarize in this paper. The standardization was done by constructing two indices of capital controls: Capital Controls Effectiveness Index (CCE Index), and Weighted Capital Control Effectiveness Index (WCCE Index). The difference between them lies only in that the WCCE controls for the differentiated degree of methodological rigor applied to draw conclusions in each of the considered papers. Inasmuch as possible, we bring to bear the experiences of less well known episodes than those of Chile and Malaysia.
This paper reviews recent theoretical and empirical work on controls over international capital movements. Theoretical contributions reviewed focus on 'second best' arguments for capital market restrictions as well as arguments based on multiple equilibria. The empirical literature suggests that controls have been 'effective' in the narrow sense of influencing yield differentials. But there is little evidence that controls have helped governments meet policy objectives, with the exception of reduction in the governments' debt service costs, and no evidence that controls have enhanced economic welfare in a manner suggested by theory.
We analyze the capital controls imposed in Malaysia in September 1998. In macroeconomic terms, these controls neither yielded major benefits nor were costly. At the same time, the stock market interpreted the capital controls (and associated events) as favoring firms with stronger political connections, and some connected firms reportedly received advantages immediately following the crisis. Analysis of financial accounts indicates that connected firms outperformed unconnected firms before the 1997-98 crisis but not afterward. After the crisis, connected firms were either not supported as much as the market had expected or the benefits they received were not manifest in their published accounts.
This paper provides empirical evidence on the effects of financial repression on government finances. Financial repression is a combination of controls on international capital flows with restrictions on domestic interest rates. The result is an artificially low cost of domestic funding to governments. The authors estimate the government revenue from financial repression as the difference between the foreign and the domestic cost of funds, times the domestic stock of government debt. The evidence indicates that the revenue from financial repression can be quite substantial and, for several countries, it is of the same order of magnitude as seigniorage. Copyright 1993 by American Economic Association.
Prominent economists reconsider the fundamentals of economic policy for a post-crisis world.
In 2011, the International Monetary Fund invited prominent economists and economic policymakers to consider the brave new world of the post-crisis global economy. The result is a book that captures the state of macroeconomic thinking at a transformational moment.
The crisis and the weak recovery that has followed raise fundamental questions concerning macroeconomics and economic policy. These top economists discuss future directions for monetary policy, fiscal policy, financial regulation, capital-account management, growth strategies, the international monetary system, and the economic models that should underpin thinking about critical policy choices.
ContributorsOlivier Blanchard, Ricardo Caballero, Charles Collyns, Arminio Fraga, Már Guðmundsson, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, Otmar Issing, Olivier Jeanne, Rakesh Mohan, Maurice Obstfeld, José Antonio Ocampo, Guillermo Ortiz, Y. V. Reddy, Dani Rodrik, David Romer, Paul Romer, Andrew Sheng, Hyun Song Shin, Parthasarathi Shome, Robert Solow, Michael Spence, Joseph Stiglitz, Adair Turner
This paper econometrically analyses the effectiveness of capital account regulation in Brazil and Peru between 2008 and 2013. The analysis, based on new indices that carefully compute regulatory changes in both countries, suggests that Brazil was successful only in shifting the composition of inflows toward longer-term, but not in curbing its aggregate volume. Peru managed to cut short-term inflows addressed to assets issued by the Central Bank, but the short-term inflows received by commercial banks remained unaffected. Regulators’ decisions about the measures selected and the resolute on their implementation, under a cost-benefit analysis, seem to be determinant for effectiveness.
The implications of capital mobility for growth and stability are some of the most contentious and least understood contemporary issues in economics. In this book, Barry Eichengreen discusses historical, theoretical, empirical, and policy aspects of the effects, both positive and negative, of capital flows. He focuses on the connections between capital flows and crises as well as on those between capital flows and growth.
Eichengreen argues that international financial liberalization, like other forms of economic liberalization, can positively affect the efficiency of resource allocation and the rate of economic growth. But analyses of both recent and historical experience also show an undeniable association between capital mobility and crises, especially when domestic institutions are weak and the harmonization of capital account liberalization and other policy reforms is inadequate. In his conclusion, Eichengreen makes suggestions for policy design to maximize the benefits of international financial liberalization while minimizing the risks of financial instability.
This chapter assesses the causes and consequences of the Icelandic banking collapse of 2008. It examines the reasons behind the rapid growth of the banks over the subsequent few years following their privatization, the lack of prudential regulation and the high-risk loan strategy of the banks. These, together with the failure of the Central Bank of Iceland to act as a lender of last resort of foreign currency, made the collapse of the financial system almost inevitable. The IMF was called in and a notable aspect of its rescue package was the imposition of capital controls. This can be seen as the culmination of a secular change of the IMF’s attitude to the regulation of cross-border financial flows. The chapter presents an assessment of how effective this strategy has been. It concludes with a more general discussion of the political economy of capital controls.
Within the management of capital flows, some emerging economies have been facing economic policy dilemmas after the global financial crisis, related to financial instrument operations, in a context of abundant liquidity in the advanced economies. However, neither the academic literature nor the financial institutions have paid sufficient attention to foreign currency (FX) derivatives regulation in emerging economies. This paper analyses the measures adopted by Brazil and the Republic of Korea. We find, first, that the breadth of regulation concerning FX derivatives operations depends on the actors involved and the type of contract used. Second, effective domestic institutions are needed to formulate and implement regulations. Third, countries should not limit their policy space through multilateral or bilateral agreements, and leave space for domestic financial regulation.
We use changes in Brazil's tax on capital inflows from 2006 to 2013 to test for direct portfolio effects and externalities from capital controls on investor portfolios. We find that an increase in Brazil's tax on foreign investment in bonds causes fund managers to significantly decrease their portfolio allocations to Brazil in both bonds and equities. Fund managers simultaneously increase allocations to other countries that have substantial exposure to China and decrease allocations to countries viewed as more likely to adjust their capital controls. Much of the effect of capital controls on portfolio allocation appears to occur through signalling - i.e., changes in investor expectations about future policies - rather than the direct cost of the controls. This evidence of significant externalities from capital controls suggests that any assessment of controls should consider their effects on portfolio flows to other countries.
We examine the experiences of five developing countries that employed various capital management techniques during the 1990s. By ‘capital management techniques’ we refer to policies of prudential financial regulation and controls that affect international capital flows to achieve national economic goals. One key finding is that by employing a diverse set of capital management techniques, policymakers in Chile, Colombia, Taiwan Province of China, Singapore and Malaysia were able to achieve critical macroeconomic objectives. These included the prevention of maturity and locational mismatch; attraction of favored forms of foreign investment; reduction in overall financial fragility, currency risk, and speculative pressures in the economy; insulation from the contagion effects of financial crises and enhancement of the autonomy of economic and social policy. We also examine the structural factors that contributed to these achievements and consider the costs associated with the capital management techniques employed. We conclude by considering the policy lessons of these experiences and the political prospects for other developing countries that wish to apply them. Introduction Developing countries can use capital management techniques to strengthen financial stability, support good macroeconomic and microeconomic policies and boost investment. Countries have, in fact, employed these techniques during the 1990s; and so we consider the experiences of five such countries. We use the term capital management techniques (CMTs) to refer to two complementary (and often overlapping) types of financial policies: policies that govern international private capital flows, called capital controls, and those that enforce prudential management of domestic financial institutions.
The extraordinary rise and fall of Iceland's financial-casino economy. Wade and Sigurgeirsdottir describe the island's neoliberal turn under a quasi-feudal elite turned banking oligopoly, and its prospects amidst the triple crisis-currency, banking, sovereign debt-now bestriding it.
This article uses a microstructure approach to analyse the effectiveness of capital controls introduced in Brazil to counter an appreciation of the Real. Based on a rich data set from the Brazilian foreign exchange market, we estimate a reduced-form VAR to characterize the interaction of the central bank, financial and commercial customers in times of regulatory policy measures. We find that capital controls change market participants’ behaviour, and that central bank interventions elicit a significant response in financial order flow. Referring to the source of order flow, we find no direct price impact by financial flows and thus no evidence that the appreciation of the Real is driven by financial customers’ activity. Instead, commercial customers seem to be a primary driver of the Real within our model.
In the wake of the global financial crisis most emerging market and developing countries experienced a surge in capital inflows that accentuated financial fragility in those countries. Unlike similar surges in the 1990s and in the five years leading to the global financial crisis in 2008, this time many emerging market and developing countries re-regulated cross-border financial flows. According to the literature such acts are seen as quite difficult, given the pervasiveness of the ‘capital mobility hypothesis’ which renders that the structural power of global financial markets is too much of a match for states, especially those in emerging markets. The paper traces how Brazil and South Korea were able to countervail the structural power of global capital markets and put in place regulations on cross-border finance in the wake of the crisis. The paper also outlines the contours an inductive theory regarding the conditions under which emerging market and developing nations may deviate from the ‘capital mobility hypotheses’ and similar literatures. This concept is referred to as ‘countervailing monetary power’.
For decades past the IMF has been a byword for economic orthodoxy, which included disapproval of policy limits on cross-border capital flows. But in 2012 it announced a new “institutional view” giving more scope for capital flow management and in effect restricting the rights of capital owners. The Fund's program in Iceland after the October 2008 crash helped to pave the way; it was the first time the Fund had endorsed capital controls in a developed country. The essay describes Iceland's boom and bust, and how the government and IMF tried to manage the crisis. With IMF support, the government implemented capital outflow controls, initially as an emergency response and then as a longer-term stabilization measure. The control regime evolved in a complicated “game”, sometimes referred to in public debate as “the battle of Iceland”, between the central bank implementing a professionally-led capital account liberalization strategy versus political parties seeking to turn the controls to their advantage. From this political economy perspective we explain why the “temporary” capital controls remain in place more than five years on. At the end we draw some broad lessons from the Iceland case for the financial booms and busts to come.
This article analyzes the capital account regulation (CAR) applied in Iceland after the banking crash of October 2008, focusing on the determinants behind the implementation of this policy tool, its effects on economic performance, and its possible costs for the Icelandic economy. The previous literature on the topic is useful for these purposes but it does not provide an adequate framework for analyzing the Icelandic experience because Iceland is a very particular case within the group of countries that have historically resorted to CAR. Our main conclusions are that capital account regulation has been essential in stabilizing the currency after the banking crash, providing space for expansionary monetary policy, and keeping public debt yields low. Even though great uncertainty still surrounds the long-term prospects of the Icelandic economy, CAR implementation has been a step toward a promising future economic scenario.
This paper estimates the effectiveness of capital controls in response to inflow surges in Brazil, Colombia, Korea, and Thailand in the 2000s. Controls are generally associated with a decrease in inflows and a lengthening of maturities, but the relationship is not statistically significant in all cases, and the effects are temporary. Controls are more successful in providing room for monetary policy than dampening currency appreciation pressures. We argue that the macroeconomic impact of capital controls depends on the extensiveness of the policy, the level of capital market development, the support provided by other policies, and the persistence of capital flows.
The paper draws lessons from the collapse of Iceland’s banking system in October 2008. The rapid expansion of the banking system following its privatization in the early 2000s is explained, as well as the inherent fragility due to the size of the banking system relative to the domestic economy and the central bank’s reserves, market manipulation enabling bank capital to expand rapidly and the weak and understaffed public institutions. Most of Iceland’s banking system was traditionally in state hands but was privatized and sold to politically favoured entities at the turn of the century, with laws and regulations subsequently changed to facilitate the expansion of the banking system. Political connections and the tacit support of the authorities enabled senior bank managers and key shareholders to extract significant private benefits while shifting risk to domestic and foreign taxpayers and foreign creditors. These problems were exacerbated by symptoms of what the paper terms the small country syndrome. The size of the banking sector made the central bank incapable of serving as the lender of last resort. The domestic supervisor, the central bank and the ministries in charge of economic affairs were understaffed and lacking in experience in how to manage a large financial sector. The rapid growth was also ultimately unsustainable due to high levels of leverage and a weak capital base due to both the rapid expansion of balance sheets and lending to finance investment in own shares. The episode demonstrates the importance of closely monitoring rapidly growing financial institutions and even possibly slowing growth when institutions are systemically important. One lesson to be drawn from the crisis relates to the role of politics in a financial crisis. The Icelandic authorities as a matter of policy encouraged the creation of an international banking centre. This involved the privatization and deregulation of the banking system, rules and regulations being relaxed and the neglect of financial supervision. Another lesson is that floating exchange rates can be hazardous in the presence of large capital flows. The central bank raised interest rates during the boom years in order to meet an inflation target. This created an interest rate differential with other countries that encourages a large volume of carry trades and incentivized domestic agents to borrow in foreign currency. Both conspired to create an asset price bubble, excessive currency appreciation and – counter-intuitively – high inflation. The result was that monetary policy as conducted was ineffective at curbing domestic demand. The eventual large depreciation of the currency made a large section of the economy insolvent. Finally, there are lessons about the European passport system in financial services and the common market. The Icelandic banks had the right to set up branches in the European Union by means of the passport on the explicit assumption that home regulators were exercising adequate controls. The collapse of the banks left the United Kingdom and the Netherlands with significant costs, demonstrating the inherent weakness in the passport when one member country can undercut the supervisory standards of other member countries. For the passport system to work, the home supervisor must be trustworthy.
— Sigridur Benediktsdottir, Jon Danielsson and Gylfi Zoega
Iceland is an unusually pure example of the dynamics that blocked regulation and caused financial fragility across the developed world for 20 years. This essay describes the statist-and-corporatist political economy of the country as it soared from near the bottom of the Western European income hierarchy at the end of the World War II to up near the top by the 1980s. It illustrates how a group of neoliberal politicians and allied civil servants drove through selective deregulation and privatisation in the 1990s and 2000s. In the space created for newly privatised banks, Icelandic financiers grew the banks and linked private equity firms through mergers and acquisitions abroad to the point where by 2007 tiny Iceland supported three banks in the world's biggest 300 banks, with assets eight times the GDP--second highest in the world after Switzerland. As profits from these overseas operations were partly redistributed back to Iceland the economy boomed, in the grip of super-Minsky processes. The government, the banks and the media interpreted the boom as testimony to the validity of neoliberal policies and went out of their way to hide increasing financial fragility from view, preventing a negative or self-correcting policy feedback loop. The accident waiting to happen happened in the wake of the Lehman collapse in September 2008. The essay charts the zigzags of the government's response and the citizens' response, and discusses the prospects for a resumption of growth on a more sustainable basis. It suggests that Iceland illustrates in miniature the ratcheting down of mass living standards underway across the Western world now that the cushion of debt has been removed, even as financiers and others in the top few percentiles of national income distributions increase their share of national income. But economic institutions and politics matter: in Iceland the large devaluation spread the cut in a relatively 'apolitical' way; the government let the banks go bust rather than bail them out at taxpayers' expense; it imposed capital controls on outflows; and it used fiscal transfers to protect the bottom half of the population from disproportionate cuts. Copyright The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.
Although globalisation is seen by many as the key economic trend, restrictions on international capital movements remain the norm in international finance. In 1996 144 out of 186 countries maintained capital controls (IMF). Yet the vast majority of economists object to most controls on capital movement, arguing that they distort the allocation of capital and allow opportunities for fraud. What leads governments to impose restrictions on international capital movements? In this 2000 study of capital controls, Gunther Schulze uses a public choice model to explain this behaviour. He considers the many aspects of capital controls, including: quantitative measurements of capital controls, evasion, misinvoicing, the interaction between an investigating government and an evader, and the role capital controls play in helping governments meet their macroeconomic objectives. In addition to the theoretical and policy discussions the book also contains a comprehensive survey of the existing literature.
Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. By Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 331p. 20.00 paper.
In recent years, there has been a surge in work on what has come to be known as “qualitative methods.” The trend is essentially reactive, developing as a response to the outpouring of work on quantitative and formal methods and the assertions by scholars in those areas that case studies and historical work are impressionistic, unscientific, and noncumulative. To counter such claims, some of the field's most distinguished qualitative scholars (e.g., Stephan Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science, 1997; James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, 2003; and Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History, 2006) have spent much time and ink to show that researchers who eschew regressions or game theory can be just as methodologically aware and sophisticated as those who embrace them. Alexander George and Andrew Bennett's Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences is an impressive and welcome addition to this literature.
The onset of the Asian financial crisis in Malaysia reduced the expected value of government subsidies to politically connected firms, accounting for roughly 9% of the estimated 5 billion gain in market value during September 1998. The evidence suggests Malaysian capital controls provided a screen behind which favored firms could be supported.
Much attention has been given to the impact of fiscal competition on the level of public expenditure, but relatively little to the impact on its composition. Using a broadly familiar and reasonably rich model of fiscal competition in the presence of mobile capital, this paper establishes a systematic bias in public spending patterns: starting from the non-cooperative equilibrium, and holding tax rates constant, welfare would be improved by a coordinated reduction in the provision of local public inputs and a corresponding increase in the public provision of local public goods benefiting immobile consumers.
Did Iceland fly too close to the sun? We have rarely had a case when a nation so avidly adopted an economic model that was bound to fail. Iceland became the poster child for this economic crisis. Robert Wade documents it graphically.
This paper provides an explanation of the simultaneous occurrence in developing countries of a large accumulation of external debt, private capital outflows and relatively low domestic capital formation. We consider a general equilibrium model in which two types of government with conflicting distributional goals randomly alternate in office. Uncertainty over the fiscal policies of future governments generates private capital flight and reduced domestic investment. This political uncertainty also provides the incentives for the current government to over-accumulate external debt. The model also predicts that left-wing governments are more inclined to impose restrictions on capital outflows than right-wing governments. Finally, we examine how political uncertainty affects the risk premium charged by lenders and how debt repudiation may occur after a change of political regime.
This paper analyzes the effectiveness of capital controls, in particular the Chilean experience with the use of the unremunerated reserve requirement. We examine the effects on interest rates, real exchange rate, and the volume and composition of capital inflows. The effects are elusive and it is difficult to pin down long-run effects. Although after the unremunerated reserve requirement was introduced there was an increase in the interest rate differential, the econometric evidence does not show it has a significant long-run effect on interest rate differentials. There are also no effects on the real exchange rate. However, the more persistent and significant effect is on the composition of capital inflows, tilting composition toward longer maturity.
Migration flows are shaped by a complex combination of self-selection and out-selection mechanisms. In this paper, the authors analyze how existing diasporas (the stock of people born in a country and living in another one) affect the size and human-capital structure of current migration flows. The analysis exploits a bilateral data set on international migration by educational attainment from 195 countries to 30 developed countries in 1990 and 2000. Based on simple micro-foundations and controlling for various determinants of migration, the analysis finds that diasporas increase migration flows, lower the average educational level and lead to higher concentration of low-skill migrants. Interestingly, diasporas explain the majority of the variability of migration flows and selection. This suggests that, without changing the generosity of family reunion programs, education-based selection rules are likely to have a moderate impact. The results are highly robust to the econometric techniques, accounting for the large proportion of zeros and endogeneity problems.
Why the Exchange Rate is Often Appreciated in Brazil?” presented at the Third Workshop “Financial Stability and Growth.” Organized by CEMACRO-Center of Structuralist Development Macroeconomics
- Nelson Barbosa
Navigating Capital Flows in Brazil and Chile.” Initiative for Policy Dialogue Working Paper. New York: Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Columbia University
- Brittany A Baumann
- Kevin P Gallagher