How Have International Capital Flows Changed the Policy Environment?

We start with the presumption that international capital flows, like international trade flows, are a Good Thing. They give the opportunity for a capital-constrained emerging country to tap into the world supply of savings, not only increasing the quantity of funds available to it, but also reducing the cost (just as globalized trade opens up opportunities to buy more cheaply). The Feldstein/Horioka (1980) paradox suggests that there is room for much more international trade in capital to allow investment to take place in those countries with high marginal productivity of capital, whether or not they are also high savers. Just as there is an international division of labor reflecting comparative advantage, there is an international division of rentiers. Indeed, over time, the Paradox seems to be lessening, reflecting the larger international capital flows.

This would lead us to expect that on average over time, international capital will flow from the mature countries to the emerging countries and that these flows will become larger over time as the path of transmission becomes smoother, information become more available and institutional channels develop more depth. How long can these inflows be expected to persist? The short, if overly simple, answer is “as long as there is a difference in the marginal return to capital.”

We can remind ourselves of how these flows affect the macro-economy. If there is an autonomous increase in inflow (for example, as the country becomes more integrated with international financial markets), this can only be absorbed in terms of real goods and services if the exchange rate appreciates and the current account moves in the direction of deficit by the same amount as the capital flow.¹ This is the transfer problem that Keynes (1929) discussed. Two things are worth noting: that the exchange rate has to appreciate; and that the capital flow, accompanied by a current account deficit, adds as much to supply as it does to demand.

1. Macro-economics: Structural Interest Differentials

Emerging countries are likely to be high-growth, high productivity, high profit economies, as they move towards the best-practice production frontier.² Of course this is a jerky “punctuated evolution,” with diversions and setbacks caused by poor domestic policies, inefficiencies and shocks. There is, however, enough inherent dynamism and profitability in this transition to the frontier to ensure that the equilibrium interest rate in these emerging economies will, on average, be higher than in mature countries, because the return on physical capital is higher. One way of expressing this idea is to say that the Wicksellian “natural” interest rate for emerging countries is likely to be higher than for mature economies (Figure 1 [ PDF 23.3KB | 1 pages ] suggests some empirical basis for this view). These emerging countries will attract foreign capital at those phases in the business cycle when investors feel confident about the risks (economic and political) of investing in countries about which they know little. This will happen, whatever the domestic policy interest setting. If the authorities try to keep interest rates low, the inflows will be used to buy real assets or equities. So the key point in thinking about interest rates is not that they have to be the same as international rates (as implied by the Impossible Trinity), but they will be higher over the medium term and policy has to work around and adapt to this. This is a structural issue, not a cyclical one, so the exchange rate implications of the higher interest rate cannot be sorted out using the Dornbusch (1976) overshooting mechanism. Nor is the exchange rate regime a relevant issue: if the country maintains a fixed rate, the real exchange rate appreciation will come about through faster domestic inflation (e.g., Hong Kong, China, at least over its medium-term history).

Inflows will not only be encouraged by these structurally higher interest rates, but will be further encouraged by the prospect of structural exchange rate gains (as in Japan, where the rate appreciated from 360 yen/dollar to 100 in the early 1970s). This might be explained in terms of the Balassa/Samuelson theorem (differential productivity performance in the tradable vis-à-vis the non-traded sectors), or may simply reflect the high overall productivity as a rise in the capital/labor ratio as the country moves towards the best-practice production frontier. During this journey, interest rates need to be higher, and the real exchange rate may appreciate. This is an attractive intrinsic environment for capital inflows (for another description of this same process, see Lipschitz et al., 2002).

2. Macroeconomics: How Does Monetary Policy Work in a Small Well-Integrated Economy?

So much for the medium-term structural forces: superimposed on these are the shorter-term cyclical influences which monetary policy addresses. How does monetary policy work in a globally integrated environment?

Three decades ago, in a less-integrated world, monetary policy worked by constraining the cyclical upswing and its accompanying asset price pressure, either with higher interest rates or credit controls, and impinged mostly on interest-sensitive expenditures such as investment and asset prices. Nowadays, for a small economy with a floating exchange rate and which is well integrated into international financial markets, when the monetary authorities raise the short-term policy interest rate in response to inflation-threatening excess demand, some borrowers are able to move out along the yield curve and obtain their funds at rates which reflect the availability of foreign funding. Essentially, the higher domestic short-term interest rates encourage borrowers to tap into overseas sources of funds (usually indirectly through financial intermediaries) to obtain some of their financing at rates which do not fully reflect the rise in the domestic short-term policy rate.³ Tighter monetary policy induces extra capital inflow, funding the cyclical upswing, at the same time that it is being constrained through higher interest rates. This new exchange rate channel restrains the inflationary impact by providing additional supplies of appreciation-cheapened goods and services via the enlarged current account deficit. Monetary policy works through the exchange rate as well as the interest rate, and the former channel may be more powerful than the latter. Monetary policy is still effective, but it works differently. Excess demand is spilled overseas rather than restrained.⁴

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