The response to turbulent financial markets might be a dose of unorthodox thinking.

Small changes in the yuan have touched off big swings in markets across the world, and the dollar has shot up against just about every currency. Amid the turmoil, financial- and economic-policy makers are advocating a tactic once anathema to all but the most mismanaged economies: capital controls.

Haruhiko Kuroda, governor of the Bank of Japan, seemed to deviate from standard economic thinking late last month when he suggested that China might benefit from stricter capital controls. Both India and Nigeria tightened restrictions on their citizens’ access to foreign currency in recent years, battling to limit capital outflows caused by the winding down of the Federal Reserve’s bond-buying program.

Controls are making an intellectual comeback, too.

“The general presumption was that capital-account liberalization was always good, and capital controls were nearly always bad,” said Olivier Blanchard, who arrived at the International Monetary Fund as chief economist in 2008 and left the fund last year. “I’ve seen the thinking change, partly because it was already wrong then, and because it was particularly wrong in the crisis.”