Flujos de capital, política monetaria y equilibrio externo 

Abstract

Unlike what happenned in most Latin American economies after the Mexican crisis, the Peruvian trade deficit kept on growing during 1995, in spite of the application of restrictive fiscal and monetary policies. In this paper, a model with free capital mobility, flexible exchange rates and a dollarized banking system is used to show a rather unusual result: that a restrictive monetary policy worsens the commercial deficit. In this institutional framework, capital controls are needed for the Central Bank to be able to regulate the total supply of domestic credit, which in time is a required condition for a restrictive monetary policy to improve the trade balance.