Taming Capital Flows

The argument of this paper is that growing capital mobility is unavoidable. Domestic financial liberalization and the revolution in information and communications technologies make it much more difficult to stop capital flows at the border. Effective controls will therefore have to become increasingly comprehensive, onerous, and distortionary. The issue is therefore how to cope with the reality of high capital mobility and to manage the transition. This means not freeing capital flows before substantial progress has been made in liberalizing domestic financial markets and strengthening financial supervision. It means liberalizing foreign direct investment first, access to stock and bond markets second, and offshore bank-funding last. It means putting in place exchange rate, monetary and fiscal policies that do not destabilize the capital account. It means reforming monetary and fiscal institutions to assure the markets of the capacity to deliver desirable monetary and fiscal outcomes.