S-WoPEc
 
Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics
HomeAboutSeriesSubject/JEL codesAdvanced Search
Institute for Economies in Transition, Bank of Finland BOFIT Discussion Papers, Institute for Economies in Transition, Bank of Finland

No 17/2001:
Managing capital flows in Estonia and Latvia

Pekka Sutela ()

Abstract: The three Baltic countries have been able to combine, Estonia since 1992 and Latvia and Lithuania since 1994, (1) a fixed exchange rate,(2) liberalisation of the capital account before having a well-functioning and fully supervised financial system, and (3) very large current account deficits. At the same time they have gone through deep structural and institutional change, which has been even faster than in several other transition economies. How have they been able to manage such a combination of characteristics that would usually be regarded inconsistent? The answer is not in clever management or control of financial markets combined with sound fundamentals. Rather, the Baltic countries have lacked several such markets that might be sources of instability. There are hardly any inter-bank markets. Public debt is absent or relatively very small. After the boomlet of 1997, the Baltic stock exchanges have generally hibernated. Banking crises have been recurrent. Not only are these economies extremely small, their degree of monetisation is very low. There are very few assets and markets for speculative capital flows. Partially, this reflects sound fundamentals, but mostly it is an unintended consequence of policy decisions. One cannot expect the experience to be easily repeated in other countries.

Keywords: the Baltic countries; capital flows and controls; financial crises; currency boards; (follow links to similar papers)

68 pages, December 23, 2001

Before downloading any of the electronic versions below you should read our statement on copyright.
Download GhostScript for viewing Postscript files and the Acrobat Reader for viewing and printing pdf files.

Full text versions of the paper:

dp1701.pdf    PDF-file
Download Statistics

Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Päivi Määttä ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson () or Helena Lundin ().

Programing by
Design by Joachim Ekebom

Handle: RePEc:hhs:bofitp:2001_017 This page was generated on 2014-12-14 19:21:14