Optimal Borrowing Constraints and Growth in a Small Open Economy

Chinese high growth has been accompanied by government restrictions on international borrowing (capital controls). In this paper, we ask: are such restrictions a useful policy tool to facilitate sustained growth? We provide a theory of borrowing constraints on households as a tool to correct a learning-by-doing externality. We build an open economy model and characterize the optimal constraints. We find welfare gains are closest to that of the Pareto efficient allocation when the externality is not too big or too small. We compute the optimal constraints along the growth path and measure their contribution to the current account and undervalued real exchange rate.