Exchange Rates And Trade Balance Adjustment In Emerging Market Economies

The paper finds that simple econometric specifications yield surprising rich and complex dynamics -- relative prices respond to the nominal exchange rate and pass-through effects, import and export volumes respond to relative price changes, and the trade balance responds to changes in import and export values.

With the loss of Soviet control in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the move toward economic liberalization in many developing countries, a huge increase in the number of convertible currencies in the world has occurred. A key aspect of the management of these currencies involves their relationships with the world economy, which is determined

There is an ongoing debate in the literature on whether global trade flows have become disconnected from the large real effective exchange rate movements in the wake of the global financial crisis. The question has important policy implications for the role of exchange rates in supporting growth and restoring external balance. In this paper, we use Turkey---a large and open emerging market economy that has experienced sizable swings of the real effective exchange rate---as a case study to test competing hypotheses. Our results lend support to the finding in existing cross-country studies that the real effective exchange rate remains an important determinant of trade flows. But, its effect is not symmetric in secular periods of appreciation and depreciation and is, oftentimes, dwarfed by the impact on trade flows of the income growth differential between trade partners.

Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience interested in economic policy issues. This Web-only series replaced Staff Position Notes in January 2011.

The rapid increase in international trade and financial integration over the past decade and the growing importance of emerging markets in world trade and GDP have inspired the IMF to place stronger emphasis on multilateral surveillance, macro-financial linkages, and the implications of globalization. The IMF's Consultative Group on Exchange Rate Issues (CGER)--formed in the mid-1990s to provide exchange rate assessments for a number of advanced economies from a multilateral perspective--has therefore broadened its mandate to cover both key advanced economies and major emerging market economies. This Occasional Paper summarizes the methodologies that underpin the expanded analysis.

The extensive use of the US dollar when firms set prices for international trade (dubbed dominant currency pricing) and in their funding (dominant currency financing) has come to the forefront of policy debate, raising questions about how exchange rates work and the benefits of exchange rate flexibility. This Staff Discussion Note documents these features of international trade and finance and explores their implications for how exchange rates can help external rebalancing and buffer macroeconomic shocks.

A reduction in the U.S. current account deficit vis-à-vis emerging Asia involves a shift in demand from U.S. to emerging Asia tradable goods and a change in international relative prices. This paper quantifies the required adjustment in the terms of trade and real exchange rates in a three-country open economy model of the U.S., China, and other emerging Asia. We compare scenarios where both Chinese and other emerging Asian export prices change by the same proportion to the case where export prices remain constant in one country and increase in the other. Our results are robust to different assumptions about elasticities of substitution and to introducing a high degree of vertical fragmentation in production in the model.

Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience interested in economic policy issues. This Web-only series replaced Staff Position Notes in January 2011.