La regulación de los flujos de capital: un análisis de las experiencias de Brasil, Perú e Islandia

Both international capital flows and their regulation are increasingly relevant in a world in which economies are becoming more and more interrelated. International investment is an unquestionable source of potential benefits, but at the same time it entails challenges for national authorities, regarding both macroeconomic policy and financial stability. Economic literature has shown great interest in these issues at least since the end of the Second World War, when the recently created International Monetary Fund became the centre of a new monetary system, whose stability depended to a great extent on the regulation of capital flows. This policy allowed countries to broaden the scope for counter-cyclical macroeconomic policies, providing governments with certain protection from international investors' behaviour. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, an intense and generalized liberalization of capital flows took place, during which capital account regulation received increasingly intense critiques from mainstream academic literature and institutions. It was predicted- and fervently encouraged- that such policies would disappear as societies evolved towards acquiring higher degrees of political and economic development and providing citizens with increased economic freedom. However, huge financial turbulences during the nineties questioned this approach, and regulations of capital flows have again been implemented in many countries during the 2000s, especially after the outbreak of the financial and economic crisis in 2008. The historical and current relevance of international investment and its regulation underpin our motivation for analysing these topics in this dissertation. The main contribution of the dissertation is the comparison of the experiences of Brazil, Peru and Iceland, involving intense capital inflows and their regulation between 2003 and 2013. The research is focused on the challenges that capital inflows involve and to which extent the regulation designed to tackle them has been effective affecting the volumen and/or the composition of these transactions. Also the main factors explaining the effectiveness are analysed, an area of great interest that has hardly been assessed by the literature so far. The results seem to confirm the starting assumptions and hypotheses. Firstly, it seems positive that countries can resort to the regulation of capital flows seems, mainly to ease the macroeconomic management and curb the risk of financial turbulences and crisis, but also to help manage such crisis, should they occur; additionally, the case study appears to be the most suitable methodology in order to pursue the main goal of the research, with specific historical experiences being the best sources of information. The second conclusion suggests that it is possible to achieve an effective regulation of capital flows, but said effectiveness strongly depends on the specific circumstances in which this policy is applied. More precisely, the intensity and coverage of the measures applied seem to play a role in this regard, which is the third conclusion. The fourth conclusion points out that the most relevant factor explaining the effectiveness of capital account regulation seems to be the political will backing its implementation. This appears to be the source of certain institutional features that lead to a proper calibration of this policy over time, which is apparently the most direct explanation for its effectiveness. The fifth conclusion emphasises the relevance of domestic banks regarding both capital inflows and its regulation. This document is organized in nine chapters, grouped into three parts. After the first introductory chapter, which deals with general methodological aspects, the second and third chapters that make up the first part are aimed at presenting a landscape of the literature relevant to the analysis. The second part sets out the main contribution of the research, starting with an empirical introduction in the fourth chapter, followed by the case studies of Brazil, Peru and Iceland -chapters five to seven- and Chapter 8 that analyses econometrically the effectiveness of the Brazilian and Peruvian policies. The third part includes Chapter 9, where we formulate and explain the conclusions of the dissertation.