Follow-up na moj petkov komentar v Financah glede koristnosti finančne integracije in o razmisleku glede vračanja kapitalskih kontrol. Debata med ekonomisti je živahna. Zunaj je nov članek “Capital Control Measures: A New Dataset” (Andrés Fernández, Michael W. Klein, Alessandro Rebucci, Martin Schindler & Martín Uribe), ki predstavljajo bazo podatkov in jo dajejo na voljo raziskovalcem. Najprej pa nekaj evolucije tega fenomena:

International capital flows are central to international macroeconomics. The interaction between the monetary and exchange rate policies of a country depends upon its stance towards capital mobility, as described by the policy trilemma. The ability of a government and its citizens to borrow and lend abroad allows domestic investment to diverge from domestic savings, which can promote economic efficiency and growth. International portfolio diversification is a potentially important means by which individuals can smooth consumption and undertake risky investments that would otherwise be unattractive. On a less salutary note, international capital flows are also blamed as an important vector through which economic disturbances are spread across countries, or as a means by which investors prompt a sudden stop that causes an economy to crash.

This range of potential outcomes from the international trade in assets has contributed to varying attitudes towards capital flows, as well as towards capital controls. Controversies over international capital flows have a long history. For example, in 1920 J.M. Keynes wrote elegiacally of a pre-war time when a person could “…adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world…” (The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Chapter II). But he took a very different tone in a 1933 speech in Dublin when he stated “… let goods be home-spun whenever it is reasonable and conveniently possible and, above all, let finance be national.”

Keynes’ negative view of international capital flows in the midst of the Great Depression echoes through time in more contemporary calls for capital controls, especially in the wake of the recent current economic and financial crisis. Capital controls were pervasive during the Bretton Woods era. These controls were reduced or eliminated beginning in the late 1970s, and, increasingly, in the 1980s and 1990s. The title of Rudiger Dornbusch’s 1998 article “Capital Controls: An Idea Whose Time is Gone” reflects a broad consensus at that time. But attitudes began to shift in response to the economic crises in the late 1990s (Dani Rodrik (1998), Jagdish Bhagwati (1998)). These changes were far from a fringe view; in 2002, Kenneth Rogoff, then serving as the Chief Economist and Director of Research of the IMF, wrote in the Fund’s publication Finance and Development “These days everyone agrees that a more eclectic approach to capital account liberalization is required.”

The Great Recession has spurred a further reevaluation of the appropriate role of capital controls. Countries as diverse as Brazil and Switzerland considered (and in the case of Brazil, implemented) controls on inflows in the face of currency appreciation, while Iceland introduced controls on outflows at the time of its crisis. A number of recent IMF staff studies and policy papers accept the use of capital controls as part of a country’s “policy toolkit” under certain circumstances, a shift that The Economist magazine dubbed “The Reformation.” Even stronger calls for a greater role for capital controls include Olivier Jeanne, Arvind Subramanian and John Williamson (2012) and Hélène Rey (2013). Some of these policy prescriptions are consistent with a new branch of theoretical research in which capital controls contribute to financial stability and macroeconomic management. The empirical research of others, however, emphasizes the ineffectiveness and potential costs of capital controls.

The evolving nature of the debate on capital controls, and the policy prescriptions that follow, suggest that further careful empirical analysis is needed. One challenge facing empirical researchers in this area concerns the availability of indicators of capital controls. Some empirical research addresses this challenge by considering the experience of a specific country. But broader, cross-country analyses require panel data reflecting the experience of a range of countries. While a number of panel data sets exist, those with broad time and/or country coverage are typically hampered by a lack of granularity (for example, Menzie Chinn and Hiro Ito (2006), Dennis Quinn (1997)), often providing little information beyond a broad index of “capital account openness,” while others with finer granularity have been more limited in terms of sample coverage (such as Martin Schindler (2009), Jacques Miniane (2004), and Natalia Tamirisa (1999)).6

In this paper, we introduce a new data set based on the methodology in Schindler (2009), but including more countries, more asset categories and more years. In particular, the new data set reports the presence or absence of capital controls, on an annual basis, for 100 countries over the period 1995 to 2013. As discussed in greater detail below, this data set revises, extends, and widens the data set originally developed by Schindler (2009), and later expanded by Klein (2012) and Fernandez et.al. (2014). The wide set of countries in this data set, and its coverage of a period when there have been changing policies, makes it a potentially important resource for research and policy.

Vir: “Capital Control Measures: A New Dataset“, Andrés Fernández, Michael W. Klein, Alessandro Rebucci, Martin Schindler & Martín Uribe, NBER Working Paper No. 20970, 2015