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Este escrito analiza el manejo de las entradas de capital en los mercados emergentes. Revisa las principales herramientas de política, incluidas la política fiscal y monetaria, la política cambiaria, la intervención en el mercado de cambios, la regulación prudencial doméstica y los controles al capital. Una conclusión clave es que si la economía funciona cerca del potencial, el nivel de reservas es adecuado, la tasa de cambio no está subvaluada y es probable que las entradas sean transitorias, el uso de controles al capital -además de la política prudencial y macroeconómica- se justifica como parte del conjunto de herramientas de política para manejar las entradas. La evidencia de la crisis actual sugiere que los controles encaminados a lograr una estructura de obligaciones externas menos riesgosa redujeron la fragilidad financiera y aumentaron la resiliencia ante caídas del crecimiento. This paper analyzes the management of surges in capital inflows to Emerging Markets. It reviews the main policy tools, including fiscal and monetary policy, exchange rate policy, foreign exchange market intervention, domestic prudential regulation, and capital controls. A key conclusion is that, if the economy is operating near potential, if the level of reserves is adequate, if the exchange rate is not undervalued, and if the flows are likely to be transitory, then use of capital controls -in addition to both prudential and macroeconomic policy- is justified as part of the policy toolkit to manage inflows. Evidence from the current crisis suggests that controls aimed at achieving a less risky external liability structure reduced financial fragilities and increased growth resilience.

This paper investigates whether there was a credit crunch in East Asia during the recent financial and economic crises. Motivated by widespread concern that, over and above any increases in real interest rates, corporates may have also faced credit rationing, we adopt an explicit disequilibrium framework for analyzing the behavior of real credit with a view to assessing whether the supply of, or demand for credit has been a binding constraint. The findings highlight the dynamics associated with a credit crunch. We find evidence of a »credit crunch« in all three crisis countries (Indonesia, Korea, Thailand) in the period immediately following the crisis as the banking system distress deepened, and the supply of (real) credit declined. Thereafter, however, credit demand also fell sharply as economic recession took hold and corporate bankruptcies increased. By the end of the first quarter of 1998, therefore, the constraining factor was the demand for credit. We conclude that, beyond the initial crisis period, there is little evidence of a credit crunch at the aggregate level, although high real interest rates - and credit rationing of individual firms - may have continued to contribute to the difficulties of the corporate sector.

This paper considers gains from international economic policy coordination when there is uncertainty concerning the functioning of the world economy, but also learning about the "true" model on the part of policymakers. The paper reports estimates of plausible alternative versions of a standard two-country model. Activist policy (either coordinated or uncoordinated) may produce large welfare losses in the absence of learning, if policymakers behave in the wrong model; hence, exogenous money targets and freely flexible exchange rates may be best. However, model learning (from observations on macroeconomic variables) causes coordinated policies to dominate activist uncoordinated policies or exogenous money targets. Copyright 1991 by American Economic Association.