Government-imposed restrictions on the ability of capital to move in or out of a country. Examples include limits on foreign investment in a country’s financial markets, on direct investment by foreigners in businesses or property, and on domestic residents’ investments abroad. Until the 20th century capital controls were uncommon, but many countries then imposed them. Following the end of the Second World War only Switzerland, Canada and the United States adopted open capital regimes. Other rich countries maintained strict controls and many made them tougher during the 1960s and 1970s. This changed in the 1980s and early 1990s, when most developed countries scrapped their capital controls. The pattern was more mixed in developing countries. Latin American countries imposed lots of them during the debt crisis of the 1980s then scrapped most of them from the late 1980s onwards. Asian countries began to loosen their widespread capital controls in the 1980s and did so more rapidly during the 1990s. In developed countries, there were two main reasons why capital controls were lifted: free markets became more fashionable and financiers became adept at finding ways around the controls. Developing countries later discovered that foreign capital could play a part in financing domestic investment, from roads in Thailand to telecoms systems in Mexico, and, furthermore, that financial capital often brought with it valuable human capital. They also found that capital controls did not work and had unwanted side-effects. Latin America’s controls in the 1980s failed to keep much money at home and also deterred foreign investment. The Asian economic crisis and capital flight of the late 1990s revived interest in capital controls, as some Asian governments wondered whether lifting the controls had left them vulnerable to the whims of international speculators, whose money could flow out of a country as fast as it once flowed in. There was also discussion of a “Tobin tax” on short-term capital movements, proposed by James Tobin, a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics. Even so, they mostly considered only limited controls on short-term capital movements, particularly movements out of a country, and did not reverse the broader 20-year-old process of global financial and economic liberalization.