This article analyses the effects of capital controls over the time-path of several macroeconomic variables of developing economies by means of a post-Keynesian macroeconomic model for an open economy without government activities. First of all, we present a macroeconomic model that embodies capital controls as an economic policy instrument. After the stability analysis of the model, we deduce a set of economic plausible values for the parameters. Using these parameter values, we describe the dynamical behavior of capacity utilization level, external debt, net exports and interest rate under different initial conditions. Next, we analyze the effects of exogenous shocks - as changes in foreign interest rate or in international trade flow - over our artificial economy. This exercise make us to realize that capital controls can contribute to the reduction of external debt volatility face an exogenous shock, but they enlarge the effects of these shocks over capacity utilization level. So we can state that the desirability of capital controls is conditional to social preferences over volatility of capacity utilization level vis-à-vis volatility of external debt.
capital controls; computational simulation; macroeconomic dynamics
