Publication: Should Capital Flows Be Regulated? A Look at the Issues and Policies
Loading...
Published
2000-03
ISSN
Date
2014-08-28
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
The author argues that externalities in financial markets, implicit and explicit guarantees on financial transactions, and information asymmetries in financial markets that may exacerbate contagion provide a rationale for a government role in managing the risk associated with cross-border capital flows. Governments can complement private sector risk management with measures that help deal with the volatility of capital flows. These measures include those that control the type and volume of capital flows and those that help investors make better investment decisions, and that may reduce herding behavior, such as better information provision. The main instruments that have been tried or recommended since the onset of the recent financial crises can be grouped in several categories. 1) Debt management: The composition, maturity structure, and level of external debt have played an important role in financial crises. High short-term debt relative to liquid assets has been found to be consistently correlated with financial crises in recent times. Governments can affect the level of debt (including private debt) and its composition, though the mix of policies they use will vary. Prudential regulation in the financial sector, corporate sector regulation, and restrictions on capital movements have all been used with varying success to change the level and composition of external debt. 2) Other macroeconomic policies: Most countries that have suffered macroeconomic crises have had fixed exchange rate systems; some have not. But whether or not a country has a fixed exchange rate is not the relevant question. The question is instead whether there is reason to expect a significant weakening of the currency, possibly as a result of a change in policy stance. Large real exchange rate appreciations have been among the main reasons for runs on currency; macroeconomic policy needs to be aimed at managing these. With a fixed exchange rate regime, flexibility must be maintained elsewhere in the economy. Policymakers may need to make tradeoffs between price and output stability once market jitters have set in. There is no single right answer to the question of which to emphasize more at a given time; it depends on a country's circumstances. 3) Risk management in the financial sector: The health of the financial sector is related to the government's fiscal position, its macroeconomic policies, and financial crises. The regulatory and supervisory frameworks in developing countries need to be adapted to the special features of these markets. Many developing countries are subject to frequent trade and capital account shocks, while lacking the means to deal with these shocks, such as adequate insurance markets. This situation may call for policies that nor only affect the incentives of lenders, but also help manage risk more directly. Examples of such policies include maturity, and liquidity requirements. 4) Information and transparency: More disclosure of information and improvements in the quality of that information could reduce the volatility that arises from herding behavior. Ex ante, they may also have a beneficial effect on the allocation of capital.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Islam, Roumeen. 2000. Should Capital Flows Be Regulated? A Look at the Issues and Policies. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 2293. © http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19844 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Climate and Social Sustainability in Fragility, Conflict, and Violence Contexts(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)Climate change is widely recognized as a driver of violent conflict, but its broader social effects remain less understood. Ignoring these dimensions risks a vicious cycle where climate policies might undermine socially just adaptation. Evidence is still limited on how climate shocks influence political participation, trust, or migration. This paper helps fill that gap by examining links between climate change, conflict, and social sustainability, with a focus on inclusion, resilience, cohesion, and legitimacy. Using secondary data from 2019–24, the study applies simple correlation-based methods to test three hypotheses on the nature, severity, and composition of these associations. The analysis combines multiple climate impact measures, new conflict classifications, recent social sustainability frameworks, and controls for population and geography. The results reveal strong correlations—not causation—between climate events and contexts of fragility, conflict, and violence. Climate impacts are most pronounced in both national and subnational conflict settings. The study also finds robust links between fragility, conflict, and violence and low levels of social sustainability, reflecting its role as both a driver and consequence of conflict. Some dimensions—such as violent events and insecurity—appear weaker in areas most affected by climate shocks. Two of the hypotheses are supported, and one remains inconclusive.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication Institutional Capacity for Policy Implementation: An Analytical Framework(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)State capacity is an important prerequisite for policy implementation, yet at the country level it is difficult to measure, assess, and reform. This paper proposes a focus on institutional capacity: the ability of public institutions to implement the specific policy mandates for which they are responsible. Based on a review of existing literature, the paper defines the different dimensions that compose institutional capacity and groups them into two cross-cutting categories: organizational dimensions (personnel, financial resources, information systems, and management practices) and governance dimensions (transparency, independence, and accountability). The paper proposes measures for organizational and governance dimensions using existing data, shows intra-institutional variation of these measures within countries, and discusses how new data could be collected for better measurement of these concepts. Finally, the paper illustrates how the framework can be used to diagnose the sources of common problems related to weak policy implementation.Publication South Africa’s Fragmented Cities: The Unequal Burden of Labor Market Frictions(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-08)Using high-resolution administrative, census, and satellite data, this paper shows that South African cities are characterized by spatial mismatches between where people live and where jobs are located, relative to 20 global peers. Areas within 5 kilometers of commercial centers have 9,300 fewer residents per square kilometer than expected, which is 60 percent below the global median. Poor, dense neighborhoods are most affected. In Johannesburg, a 10-percentile increase in distance from the nearest business hub corresponds to a 3.7-percentile drop in asset wealth (a proxy of household wellbeing) and 4.9-percentile drop in employment. In Cape Town, the declines are 4.0 and 3.7 percentiles, respectively. Employment is 87 percent lower in the poorest decile than the richest in Johannesburg and 61 percent lower in Cape Town. These findings suggest that South Africa’s spatial organization of people and economic activity constrains agglomeration and reinforces inequality. This methodology provides a scalable and standardized data-driven framework to analyze spatial accessibility and agglomeration frictions in complex, data-constrained urban systems.Publication Investment in Emerging and Developing Economies(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)The world faces a pressing challenge to meet key development objectives amid slowing growth and rising macroeconomic and geopolitical risks. With the number of job seekers rising rapidly, infrastructure shortfalls continuing to be large, and climate costs mounting, the case for a significant investment push has never been stronger. Yet the capacity to respond in many emerging markets and developing economies has eroded. Since the global financial crisis, investment growth has slowed to about half its pace in the 2000s, with both public and private investment weakening. Foreign direct investment inflows—a critical source of capital, technology, and managerial know-how—have also fallen sharply and become increasingly concentrated, leaving low-income countries with only a marginal share. The risks of further retrenchment are significant, as trade tensions, policy uncertainty, and elevated debt levels continue to weigh on investment. Reigniting momentum will require ambitious domestic reforms to strengthen institutions, rebuild macro-fiscal stability, and deepen trade and investment integration—the foundations of a supportive business climate. At the same time, international cooperation is indispensable. A renewed commitment to a predictable system of cross-border trade and investment flows, combined with scaled-up financial support and sustained technical assistance, is essential to help emerging markets and developing economies—especially low-income countries and economies in fragile and conflict situations—bridge financing gaps and implement the domestic reforms needed to restore investment as an engine of growth, jobs, and development.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Lessons from World Bank Research on Financial Crises(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008-11)The benefits of financial development and globalization have come with continuing fragility in financial sectors. Periodic crises have had real but heterogeneous welfare impacts and not just for poor people; indeed, some of the conditions that foster deep and persistent poverty, such as lack of connectivity to markets, have provided a degree of protection for the poor. Past crises have also had longer-term impacts for some of those affected, most notably through the nutrition and schooling of children in poor families. As in other areas of policy, effective responses to a crisis require sound data and must take account of incentives and behavior. An important lesson from past experience is that the short-term responses to a crisis-macroeconomic stabilization, trade policies, financial sector policies and social protection-cannot ignore longer-term implications for both economic development and vulnerability to future crises.Publication Orderly Sovereign Debt Restructuring : Missing in Action!(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-05)This paper takes a hard look at the experience with official intervention in sovereign debt crises, focusing on debt crises of the 1980s, Russia in 1998, Argentina in 2001, and Greece in 2010. Based on the track record, the authors argue that in situations where countries face a solvency problem, official intervention is more likely to succeed if official money is lent at the risk-free rate reflecting its seniority and private creditors receive an upfront haircut. Such an approach would limit the costs associated with procrastination and increase the chances of success by enabling a more realistic fiscal program to restore solvency. They examine the moral hazard implications for debtor countries of this proposal and find that these are unlikely to be severe. In fact, after their crises of 1997-2001, emerging market countries embarked on an aggressive and comprehensive program of self-insurance, indicating that they are weary of debt crises and their costs. However, the prospect of an upfront haircut for private creditors in the event of insolvency is likely to make them more diligent in their sovereign lending decisions.Publication Managing Financial Integration and Capital Mobility -- Policy Lessons from the Past Two Decades(2011-08-01)The accumulated experience of emerging markets over the past two decades has laid bare the tenuous links between external financial integration and faster growth, on the one hand, and the proclivity of such integration to fuel costly crises on the other. These crises have not gone without learning. During the 1990s and 2000s, emerging markets converged to the middle ground of the policy space defined by the macroeconomic trilemma, with growing financial integration, controlled exchange rate flexibility, and proactive monetary policy. The OECD countries moved much faster toward financial integration, embracing financial liberalization, opting for a common currency in Europe, and for flexible exchange rates in other OECD countries. Following their crises of 1997-2001, emerging markets added financial stability as a goal, self-insured by building up international reserves, and adopted a public finance approach to financial integration. The global crisis of 2008-2009, which originated in the financial sector of advanced economies, meant that the OECD "overshot" the optimal degree of financial deregulation while the remarkable resilience of the emerging markets validated their public finance approach to financial integration. The story is not over: with capital flowing in droves to emerging markets once again, history could repeat itself without dynamic measures to manage capital mobility as part of a comprehensive prudential regulation effort.Publication Country Insurance : Reducing Systemic Vulnerabilities in Latin America and the Caribbean(Washington, DC, 2008-03)This study begins from the premise that output and consumption are more volatile and prone to sharp contractions in developing than in high-income economies. This suggests that developing countries are somehow "underinsured" and may thus need to invest more in "country insurance" policies. To shed some light on this issue, the author begin by providing in the first chapter evidence of the excessive volatility faced by developing countries in general (and Latin American and Caribbean, LAC, countries in particular) and then discuss some of the welfare costs associated with such volatility. In second chapter, the author focus on the main trade-offs and on the strategic choices confronted by developing countries if they decide to increase their resilience to external shocks. Finally, in the third chapter, the author look at different policy options, focusing on how the international financial institutions (IFIs) in general and the World Bank in particular can help developing countries' reduce their vulnerability to external shocks. While excessive volatility in developing countries affects both government and the private sectors, this study limits its focus to the government sector. The private sector challenges will be addressed in future research.Publication Macroprudential Policy Framework : A Practice Guide(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014-04-29)This practice guide is primarily intended as a reference and guidance for emerging market economies in their migration to a formal macroprudential policy framework. It relies largely on the existing wisdom, knowledge, and experience and was written with the intention of assisting policy makers (and the World Bank staff working with these authorities) in the implementation of macroprudential policy frameworks in jurisdictions with the following characteristics representative of a typical emerging market and developing economy: 1) a simple and bank-dominated financial system where other financial sector segments are much smaller, but growing; 2) banking supervision function is within the central bank; 3) financial sector regulation/supervision is not integrated; 4) uncertain availability of quality data. A macroprudential policy framework is not a silver bullet for safeguarding financial stability. It is also useful to highlight that a macroprudential policy framework cannot take the place of other public policy frameworks. While pursuing macroprudential policy to build a more resilient financial system, authorities should also take into consideration the significant financial development needs that may exist in their respective jurisdictions. This Practice Guide has been structured in a logical sequence that mirrors implementation. The second and third sections are laid out to clarify and provide some context to the concept of a macroprudential approach to supervision and discuss the institutional framework. The fourth and fifth sections deal with the operational aspects of macroprudential policy framework that are timely detection of systemic risks using early warning systems and addressing the buildup of systemic risks with macroprudential policy instruments.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Regional Poverty and Inequality Update: Latin America and the Caribbean, October 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-10-23)This brief summarizes recent facts related to poverty and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) using the latest wave of harmonized household surveys from the Socio-Economic Database for LAC (SEDLAC). This brief was produced by the Poverty Global Practice in the LAC Region of the World Bank.Publication Housing Subsidies for Refugees(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-22)Refugees require assistance for basic needs like housing but local host communities may feel excluded from that assistance, potentially affecting community relations. This study experimentally evaluates the effect of a housing assistance program for Syrian refugees in Jordan on both the recipients and their neighbors. The program offered full rental subsidies and landlord incentives for housing improvements, but saw only moderate uptake, in part due to landlord reluctance. The program improved short-run housing quality and lowered housing expenditures, but did not yield sustained economic benefits, partly due to redistribution of aid. The program unexpectedly led to a deterioration in child socio-emotional well-being, and also strained relations between Jordanian neighbors and refugees. In all, housing subsidies had limited measurable benefits for refugee well-being while worsening social cohesion, highlighting the possible need for alternative forms of aid.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Thailand Monthly Economic Monitor, October 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-10-22)Fiscal conditions remained stable, with a modest widening of the deficit to 3.1 percent of GDP. New stimulus measures are expected to support short-term demand without breaching the public debt ceiling. Inflation stayed negative, reflecting lower energy and food prices amid subdued domestic demand. The central bank kept the policy rate unchanged, citing limited policy space. Thailand’s growth momentum has slowed further as manufacturing activity and services weakened as projected. Tourism remained subdued, largely due to fewer Chinese visitors. Goods exports also slowed as earlier front-loaded orders faded, particularly in agriculture and industrial goods. The Thai baht depreciated in early October as the US dollar appreciated and the current account turned negative.Publication Ukraine Country Environmental Analysis(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-01)The objective of the Country Environmental Analysis (CEA) is to assess the adequacy and performance of the policy, legal, and institutional framework for environmental management in Ukraine, in light of the decentralization process of environmental governance and wider reform objectives, and to provide recommendations to government to address the key gaps identified. Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe and has a population of 43 million, the majority of whom live in urban areas. It is a lower middle income country, with the services, industry and agriculture sectors being main contributors to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Ukraine faces a number of environmental challenges, as identified in its National Environmental Strategy 2020 (NES). Key among these are: air pollution; quality of water resources and land degradation; solid waste management; biodiversity loss; human health issues associated with environmental risk factors; in addition to climate change. The scope of Ukrainian environmental legislation is quite broad and comprehensive (more than 300 legal acts) and covers most areas of environmental protection and natural resources management. However, the environmental legislation faces a number of weaknesses:The environmental legislation is largely declaratory in nature and does not have all the essential enforcement mechanisms for the implementation of legal acts and international agreements; Many of the acts are not coordinated with each other; and Legislation undergoes limited analysis of its impact—for example, no in-depth analysis such as Regulatory Impact Analysis is conducted for proposed pieces of legislation.