平衡向公平倾斜：资本管制与外债结构

Tilting the BalanceTowards Equity: Capital Tobias Krahnke and Wenjie Li WP/26/XX IMF Working Papersdescribe research inprogress by the author(s) and are published toelicit comments and to encourage debate.The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are 2026February IMF Working Paper Strategy Policy and Review Department Tilting the Balance Towards Equity: Capital Controls and the Structure of External Liabilities Prepared byTobias Krahnke and Wenjie Li* Authorized for distribution byMichele Ruta IMF Working Papersdescribe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicitcomments and to encourage debate.The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the ABSTRACT:Capital flow restrictions have long been debated as a tool to manage external financialvulnerabilities, as volatile international capital flows and high external debt can contribute to financial crises.However, empirical evidence on whether capital flow management measures (CFMs) can shift the compositionof countries’ external liabilities toward more stable types of funding is limited. Using a novel dataset of granular RECOMMENDED CITATION:Tobias Krahnke and Wenjie Li (2026). Tilting the Balance Towards Equity:Capital Controls and the Structure of External Liabilities. IMF Working Paper 26/37. WORKING PAPERS Tilting the Balance Towards Equity: Prepared byTobias Krahnke and Wenjie Li 1Introduction ”The advocacy of a control of capital movements must not be taken to meanthat the era of international investment should be brought to an end [...] The —J.M. Keynes (1942), as cited in IMF (1969), p. 13. The role of capital flow restrictions in managing external financial vulnerabilities has beenwidely debated, as volatile international capital movements and large external debt canamplify the risk of financial crises, especially in emerging market economies (Ma and Wei (2020)). Liquidity crises seldom arise from sudden stops in equity inflows. Instead,they are more often triggered by abrupt halts in debt inflows, making high externaldebt levels a key risk factor (Cat˜ao and Milesi-Ferretti (2014)). Against this backdrop,there is growing consensus that the structure of a country’s foreign liabilities – i.e., therelative shares of foreign direct investment (FDI), portfolio equity, and external debtin its external financing – significantly influences its susceptibility to external financialcrises.While contained external leverage is thus deemed preferable, attracting equityfinancing and avoiding over-borrowing remains a complex challenge for many countries.Especially in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the role of capital controls hasthus come under renewed scrutiny, not as a means to shut out international investment,but as a potential instrument to promote more stable and resilient external financing. Thedebate has focused primarily on capital inflows rather than outflows. Inflow measures aretypically viewed as tools to influence the scale and composition of external financing during liberalized equity inflows while maintaining restrictions on debt inflows. This asymmetricliberalization was followed by a significant rise in the equity share of foreign liabilities,which plateaued after the global financial crisis (panel a).Brazil, by contrast, adopteda different path, tightening restrictions on debt inflows in the mid- to late-1990s whilegradually easing equity inflow controls.A similar increase in the equity share followed Theoretical models also suggest that CFMs can be used as a policy lever to influencethe composition of external liabilities (Ma and Wei (2020)).However, robust empiricalevidence on their effectiveness in shaping a country’s external capital structure remains on capital controls rely on binary labels for capital transactions (‘no’ for full opennessand ‘yes’ for any form of control) drawn from the IMF’sAnnual Report on ExchangeArrangements and Exchange Restrictions(AREAER). As systematic evaluations ofcapital transactions, these binary indices can provide a useful benchmark for comparing the overall level of capital controls across countries (Chinn and Ito (2006), Fern´andez,Klein, Rebucci, Schindler, and Uribe (2016), Baba, Cervantes, Darbar, Kokenyne, andZotova (2026)).1However, they are limited by their reliance on aggregate classifications: The aim of this paper is to fill the current gap in the literature by empirically testingthe predictions of existing theoretical models and providing new evidence on whethercapital flow restrictions can effectively tilt the composition of foreign liabilities towardmore stable sources of funding, thereby increasing the equity share. Using a novel datasetof granular capital control indicators, we show that a less restrictive stance on equity-typeinflows by non-residents is associated with a higher equity share in a country’s foreignliabilities. In contrast, greater capital account openness with respect to debt-type flows –such as portfolio debt