Liberalization of Capital Flows in Korea: Big-Bang or Gradualism?

Capital market liberalization has become an irreversible trend in Korea since 1992. With the current level of high interest rate in Korea, however, drastic full-scale liberalization would certainly attract a large amount of capital inflows and appreciate the Korean won. This would affect the price competitiveness of Korean products in international markets, which could bring about significant macro-instability in an economy like Korea which relies heavily upon external transactions. Through simulations using a macro-model based on the neoclassical long-run convergence and the Keynesian short-run dynamics, this paper attempts to provide some quantitative assessments of several alternative policy choices including the speed of liberalization.