RIEB Discussion Paper Series No.2026-23

Title

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

Abstract

This paper constructs a monthly, action-level database of capital flow management measures (CFMs) and macroprudential measures (MPMs) for the fourteen ASEAN+3 economies from the March 2024 compilation of the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO), and uses it to replicate, for the region, the principal stylized facts of Binici, Das and Pugacheva (2024, IMF Economic Review; hereafter BDP). Following BDP, we code each action by instrument, by the direction of the flow it targets and the direction of the policy (tightening or easing), and by balance-of-payments functional category, and we build the net inflow, net outflow and cumulative net tightening indices. The instrument-level and functional-category regularities of BDP reappear almost exactly in the region: price-based CFMs are oriented towards inflows and tightening, administrative measures dominate and are mostly outflow easing, and "Other Investment" (banks) is the most heavily targeted category. Because our regional sample is not the same as BDP's, the picture differs in three ways: inflow and outflow measures are more evenly balanced, the crisis-driven outflow controls that are prominent in BDP are mostly absent, and the data show a steady, long-run easing of restrictions on residents investing abroad. The timing of actions lines up with BDP's global tightening waves of 2010–11 and 2015–17, with one exception: the region's COVID-19 response consisted entirely of easings. Most actions (77 percent) adjust an existing measure rather than introduce a new one. A stock-taking, walls/gates classification reproduces BDP's classification of China and Malaysia as "walls," but we show that a high in-force count need not signal a tightening stance: Malaysia carries the region's largest CFM stock (nineteen measures in force) yet has eased most of it and records the most open cumulative stance in the region. Two economies are classified differently from BDP, for two different reasons: Indonesia becomes a "wall" once its record is read over a longer observation window, and Hong Kong, a structurally open financial centre, is "open" in BDP but a "gate" here, because the regional record captures its residency-based property measures more fully, and two of them remain in force.

Note

The accompanying Excel workbook (asean3_cfm_mpm_index_ver35.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