best of our knowledge, our paper is the first to take stock of IRCs around the world based on a survey involving a large number of economies and covering several aspects of a country’s interest rate regime. Our paper also complements recent literature aimed to assess the welfare impact of IRCs at the country level (e.g. Safavian and Zia, 2018, and Alper et al., 2019, for Kenya; or Madeira, 2019, and Schmukler et al., 2018, for Chile).

The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. The next section describes the data and how they were obtained. It also draws upon our new and comprehensive database to provide a selective overview of key aspects of IRCs collected through the survey. The third section uses the data to provide a preliminary estimation of the degree of bindingness of IRCs by calculating the gap, expressed in real terms, between legal restrictions and actual interest rates. This section also presents pairwise correlations between the degree of IRC bindingness and other dimensions of financial repression. The final section concludes.

# **II. Overview of the Survey Data**

We designed and implemented a survey to collect key features of _de jure_ IRCs on lending and deposit markets around the world. In addition to explicit regulation, governments can and often control interest rates through political pressure, moral suasion, implicit subsidies in various financing support programs, and other interventions. However, given the difficulties to track and measure _de facto_ IRCs in a cross-country setting, we took stock only of legal or _de jure_ IRCs, that is, administered caps or floors to interest rates via explicit regulation. Specifically, we focus on IRCs in lending and deposit markets, acknowledging that _de jure_ restrictions can also apply to interbank and bond markets.

The formulation and completion of the survey entailed a number of inter-related steps. Leveraging existing contacts at central banks and financial supervisory authorities, the initial outreach effort targeted the pertinent staff within local regulators and supervisors. However, given the sometimes-elusive nature of IRCs, with implementing authorities varying from central banks to different ministries, we also decided to contact the local banking associations, as these are in a prime position to provide specific references to the domestic or regional institutional arrangements. With the aim to cover as many countries as possible, the outreach effort included more than 150 jurisdictions.

Despite our best efforts, our survey faced several challenges. Not every country responded to the survey. Also, officials from the same country or even the same agency sometimes provided conflicting answers. Therefore, we had a second outreach effort to non-respondent local authorities relying on the contacts of World Bank Group financial sector experts, while we also followed up with the authorities that had provided inconsistent or incomplete responses. In a few countries where we still faced difficulties getting a response from the local authorities, we relied on the answers of World Bank Group financial sector experts.<sup>6</sup> In addition, in an attempt to reconcile any inconsistencies, we checked our responses with Ferrari et al. (2018), who recently took stock of lending interest rate caps collecting data from private and public sources; with the 2017 Global Financial Inclusion and Consumer Protection Survey, which included

> 6 These countries are Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, China, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and the United States.

6