Measuring on-going changes in China's capital controls: A de jure and a hybrid index data set

Jinzhao Chen and Xingwang Qian

China Economic Review, 2016, vol. 38, issue C, 167-182

Abstract: Liberalizing China's capital account controls may have profound implications for the RMB exchange rate, monetary policy autonomy, and Chinese economy. However, rigorous studies on the importance of China's capital controls are limited, primarily due to the scarcity of proper measurements of China's capital controls. In this paper we create a new data set of indices including de jure and hybrid measurements of the changes in China's capital controls. In contrast to other capital control indices that are compiled in a yes-or-no style, we quantify the intensity of changes in China's capital controls. Our indices reveal a persistent but uneven process of capital account liberalization in China between 1999 and 2012. This paper describes the de jure and hybrid indices, including indices for capital controls on individual asset categories, gross flows, inflows and outflows, as well as for resident and nonresident asset transactions. Understanding that China usually implements policies in a step by step gradualist style, we extract this gradual information from the text in the IMF's Annual Report on Exchange Arrangement and Exchange Restrictions (AREAER) and some supplementary material from other sources.

Keywords: Capital flows; China's capital controls; De jure index; Hybrid index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C82 F15 F21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X16000031
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Measuring the on-going changes in China's capital controls: A de jure and a hybrid index data set (2016)
Working Paper: Measuring the On-Going Changes in China's Capital Flow Management: A De Jure and a Hybrid Index Data Set (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:38:y:2016:i:c:p:167-182

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2016.01.002

Access Statistics for this article

China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu

More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().