Cross-border restrictions in the age of geopolitical tensions: What seven decades of data tell us

Government

As geoeconomic tensions rise, researchers rush to understand how cross-border restrictions have been used in the past. This column constructs a new, publicly available, daily dataset on de jure cross-border flow restrictions using seven decades of IMF reports. Capital account controls are only a small part of a much wider toolkit spanning current account, foreign exchange market and financial sector measures, and these tools are typically deployed in multi-instrument packages, especially during