Foreign exchange controls

Countries with weak and/or developing economies generally use foreign exchange controls to limit speculation against their currencies.

This leads to a situation where the actual demand for foreign currency is greater than that which is available on the official market.

For instance, many western European countries implemented exchange controls in the years immediately following World War II.

The measures were gradually phased out, however, as the post-war economies on the continent steadily strengthened; the United Kingdom, for example, removed the last of its restrictions in October 1979.

[1] Francoist Spain kept foreign exchange controls from the Spanish Civil War to the 1970s.

Four exchange control stamps in a South African passport from the mid-1980s allowing the passport holder to take a particular amount of currency out of the country. Exchange controls such as these were imposed by the apartheid -era South African government to restrict the outflow of capital from the country