The international community invests considerably more effort in maintaining a level playing field for international trade in goods than for international trade in assets. One could argue that this is justified by the fact that the gains from free trade seem much larger for the former than for the latter (Bhagwati 1998). And Chapter 3 of our book, which uses a “meta-regression” approach incorporating a large number of empirical specifications, confirms the finding in most of the literature: free capital mobility has little impact on economic development (although there is some evidence that foreign direct investment and stock market liberalisation may, at least temporarily, raise growth).
The problem about using this finding to be agnostic or permissive about capital account restrictions is that those restrictions can be used to distort real exchange rates to the advantage of the countries that impose them. This contradicts the purpose of trade rules and over time may erode the support for free trade.
China, because of its importance in the global economy, is the most significant example. It would be an exaggeration to describe the Chinese capital account as closed, if only because China receives large amounts of foreign direct investment (and even encourages it through tax incentives). But China severely restricts other forms of capital inflows, and controls its outflows too. Most of the Chinese foreign assets are accumulated as international reserves, which the authorities have accumulated in large quantities.
However, full control over capital flows implies full control over its macroeconomic doppelganger, the trade balance, and hence the real exchange rate. Under some conditions, as shown in Jeanne (2011), full control over the capital account allows the authorities to undervalue the real exchange rate and affect trade flows in the same way as they would with import tariffs and export subsidies.