Sectoral Capital Flows: Covariates, Co-movements, and Controls

This paper assembles a comprehensive sectoral capital flows dataset for 64 advanced and emerging economies, from 2000-18, including direct, portfolio, and other investment to and from five sectors: namely, central banks (CB), general government (GG), banks (BKs), non-financial corporates (NFCs) and other financial corporates (OFCs). Using such data, this paper highlights the usefulness of a sectoral approach in assessing capital flow covariates, co-movements, and the effectiveness of capital controls. We show that 1) sectoral flows have varying sensitivities to measures of the global financial cycle and different cyclicality with respect to output growth; 2) co-movements in intra-sectoral resident and non-resident and co-movements with OFC sectoral flows explain a large part of the observed positive correlation between gross inflows and outflows; and, 3) sector-specific tightening capital control measures appear effective in reducing the volume of flows to NFCs and OFCs.