To respond to the adverse impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on developing countries, the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is leading a project jointly implemented by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCWA), and the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) on mobilizing financial resources for development in the time of Covid-19. The project aims to strengthen diagnostic and policy design capacity of the relevant macroeconomic, fiscal and debt financing authorities in low-income and middle-income countries in order to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and to ensure a recovery that enables the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In the first phase of the project, ECLAC commissioned studies on experiences with capital account management measures in Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean to draw policy recommendations for developing countries to maintain policy space and stem the potentially harmful effects of unregulated capital flows on the financial and real sectors both during the crisis and the recovery.

Building on this work, studies are currently underway on macroprudential policy instruments, outlining a macroprudential policy agenda for the Latin America and the Caribbean region. The study will also consider the experiences with macroprudential policies and instruments in other developing regions, including in Asia-Pacific and Africa, to provide an adequate framework for the analysis of macroprudential tools.

This experts workshop, jointly hosted by UNCTAD and ECLAC, will bring together Central Bank officials from Latin America, academics, and UN agencies to discuss the initial findings of these studies, exchange experiences, and promote a better understanding of the advantages and drawbacks of different variants of capital account management and macroprudential policies and techniques that can be applied.

Format

After an opening session, each panel will analyze a different regional case study, which will be presented by its author. The Asian experience will be presented by Jayati Ghosh (Amherst University), the African experience by C. P. Chandrasekhar (Jawaharlal Nehru University), and the Latin American experience by Pablo Bortz (CONICET, Argentina).

Discussants from central banks and academia in each panel will subsequently provide feedback and share their experiences and expertise. Each regional case study will be discussed with a view to the policy implications for Latin American and the Caribbean countries. In a final wrap-up session, Matías Vernengo (Bucknell University) and distinguished discussants will synthesize the key takeaways from the previous sessions and discuss the way forward.