RIEB Discussion Paper Series No.2026-23

Title

Capital Flow Management in the ASEAN+3: A High-Frequency Database and Its Stylized Facts

Abstract

We build a monthly, action-level database of capital flow management measures (CFMs) for the fourteen ASEAN+3 economies from the March 2024 compilation of CFMs and macroprudential measures by the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO). The compilation records 446 policy changes, 230 of them CFMs. Two steps make it usable at monthly frequency. We recover the effective month of the measures that AMRO dates only to a year, which raises the share of actions with a documented month from 75 to 88 percent; and we check the result against Binici, Das and Pugacheva (2024; hereafter BDP) month by month for the seven economies that both databases cover. The other seven are not in BDP's sample. We then build the indices that BDP define, and add two indices of our own: a cumulative index of CFMs on gross inflows and a cumulative index of CFMs on gross outflows. Together they show which side of the capital account an economy acts on. Thailand's positive net stance, for example, is not a tightening of measures on inflows but a sustained easing of the measures that govern its own residents investing abroad. The region matches BDP on which instruments are used most and on which parts of the balance of payments are targeted most often. It does not match on timing, nor on the instrument mix by income group. Most CFM actions (77 percent) change a measure that is already in place, which is why monthly data matter. The database is released with the paper as an Excel workbook.

Note

The accompanying Excel workbook (asean3_cfm_mpm_index_ver36.xlsx) is available on the author's website.

Inquiries

Yang ZHOU
Graduate School of Economics, Nagoya City University, JAPAN

Shigeto KITANO
Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration
Kobe University
Rokkodai-cho, Nada-ku, Kobe
657-8501 Japan
Phone: +81-78-803-7036
FAX: +81-78-803-7059