S‐curve Dynamics of Trade in Africa*

Abstract: Two concepts summarize the short‐run relationship between the trade balance and the terms of trade or the real exchange rate, the old concept known as the J‐curve and a new concept that comes under the heading of the S‐curve. The S‐curve introduced in 1994 basically claims that while the cross‐correlation between past value of the trade balance and current value of the exchange rate is negative, the correlation is positive between the future value of trade balance and the current value of the exchange rate. In this paper we investigated the experiences of 20 African nations and found support for the S‐curve in eight of them.     

The effect of exchange rate volatility on international trade in East Asia

In this paper, we empirically investigate the relationship between exchange rate volatility and international trade, focusing on East Asia. Our findings are summarized as follows: first, intra-East Asian trade is discouraged by exchange rate volatility more seriously than trade in other regions. Second, one important source of the discouragement is that intermediate goods trade in international production networks, which is quite sensitive to exchange rate volatility compared with other types of trade, occupies a significant fraction of East Asian trade. Third, the negative effect of the volatility is greater than that of tariffs and smaller than that of distance-related costs in East Asia.     

人民币实际有效汇率与中澳贸易收支的关系——基于向量误差修正模型(VEC)分析

文章利用向量误差修正模型（VEC）,对中澳贸易收支与人民币实际有效汇率、中国实际GDP、澳大利亚实际GDP之间的关系作了实证分析。研究结果表明：中澳两国GDP、人民币实际有效汇率与两国双边贸易收支这四者之间存在长期均衡的关系;人民币有效汇率与两国贸易收支之间没有因果关系;调整人民汇率不能解决澳大利亚对中国的贸易逆差问题;人民币汇率与双边贸易收支之间不存在理论上的J效应;澳大利亚经济的发展有益于中国经济的发展,中国经济目前还是一个外贸拉动型的经济发展模式。     

The Effect of Exchange Rate on Bilateral Trade Balance: New Evidence from Malaysia and Thailand

This paper attempts to identify the major economic factors that influence the bilateral trade balances of Malaysia and Thailand with the US and Japan. To this end, an unrestricted VAR model was estimated using quarterly frequency data from 1980: I to 1996: IV. The Johansen results indicate a stable long-run relation between trade and three macro variables: exchange rate, domestic income and foreign income. The main findings of this paper are: (i) the real effective exchange rate is an important variable in the trade balance equation and devaluation improves the trade balances of both economies in the long-run; (ii) the other important variables that determine trade balance include domestic and foreign incomes; (iii) the results indicate no J-curve effect and causal run from exchange rate to trade balance, (iv) the real effects of devaluation are distributed over a period of eight to nine quarters.     

Real Exchange Rates,the Trade Balance and Net Foreign Assets: Long-Run Relationships and Measures of Misalignment

In this paper we estimate equilibrium exchange rates for 23 OECD countries and four less mature economies in a panel data setting. Our empirical analysis demonstrates significant links between the trade balance and net foreign assets, and between real exchange rates and the trade balance, rather than between real exchange rates and net foreign asset, as predicted by the model of Lane and Milessi-Ferretti (2002). Our study indicates that, in terms of the association between real exchange rates and trade balance, there is heterogeneity between the emerging market economies and the OECD countries. Finally, we construct various measures of exchange rate misalignment for all the exchange rates included in our panels.     

Supply chain trade and technological transfer in the ASEAN + 3 region

This paper analyses how economic integration and the international division of labour have evolved among the ASEAN + 3 countries in the last 20 years. The paper proposes an indicator of the level of technological sophistication based on revealed comparative advantages and uses it to investigate the relation between technological advance, factor endowments and supply chain trade. It is shown that supply chain-trade does not facilitate technological transfer. On the contrary: FDI appears to have significant and negative spill-over effects on technological change. Positive spill-overs from FDI materialize only when host countries have sufficiently high levels of education.     

Effects of Japanese macroeconomic statistic announcements on the dollar/yen exchange rate: High-resolution picture

Using high-frequency transaction data of the actual trading platform, we examine market impact of Japanese macroeconomic statistics news within minutes of their announcements on the dollar/yen exchange rate. Macroeconomic statistics surprises that consistently have significant effect on dollar/yen returns include Tankan (business condition survey conducted by Bank of Japan), GDP, industrial production, price indices and balance of payment. The announcement itself, in addition to the magnitude of the surprise, is found to increase the number of deals and price volatility immediately after the announcement. Most effects, when significant, take place within 30 min of statistics announcements.     

Exchange Rates and the Trade Balance for Dynamic Asian Economies—Does the J-Curve Exist for Singapore,Malaysia, and Korea?

The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between the real trade balance and the real exchange rate for bilateral trade in merchandise goods between Singapore, Korea, and Malaysia and the USA and Japan on a quarterly basis over the period 1970 to 1996 using the partial reduced form model of Rose and Yellen (1989) derived from the two-country imperfect substitutes model. With the exception of Korean trade with the USA, and in line with recent work using a similar methodology, our findings suggest that the real exchange rate does not have a significant impact on the real trade balance, and for Singapore and Malaysia we can find no persuasive evidence for J-curves. For Korea, however, the data were consistent with some J-curve effects with respect to both Japan and the USA. Moreover, it is possible that for Korea these effects were being masked or muted by small country pricing of exports in foreign currency, but there was no evidence that imports subsequently fell as the lag length on the real exchange rate increased, which would be required to support a strict interpretation of the J-curve.     

The Post‐Mao economic reform in China: A Korean view

Abstract

Previous studies that were concerned with the impact of depreciation of the ringgit on the Malaysian trade balance employed data either between Malaysia and rest of the world or between Malaysia and each of her major trading partners. Specifically, the bilateral trade balance between Malaysia and the US is shown to be insensitive to the real bilateral ringgit–dollar rate. In this article we wonder if disaggregating trade flows between Malaysia and the US by commodity could help us to discover any significant effects that the real exchange rate could have. We consider 101 industries that export from US to Malaysia and 17 industries that import from Malaysia. While majority of the industries showed short-run sensitivity to the real bilateral exchange rate, short-run effects lasted into the long run almost in half of the industries in both group.     

High frequency perspective on jump process,long memory property and temporal aggregation: Case of $-AUD exchange rates

The high frequency 30 min $-AUD exchange rate is investigated using a parametric FIGARCH model. The FIGARCH model is found to be the preferred specification for the 30 min returns and temporally aggregated returns, with similar values of the long memory parameter across various aggregated returns. This paper employs the Bernoulli jump process and the Poisson jump process to represent conditional mean jumps in the high frequency returns and the aggregated returns. The estimation results present that the jumps are quite significant in the conditional mean process and that the long memory parameters are remarkably reduced over the aggregated returns after the jumps are accounted for.     

Long memory volatility dependency,temporal aggregation and the Korean currency crisis: the role of a high frequency Korean won (KRW)–US dollar ($) exchange rate

Using a new type of 5 min high frequency dataset consisting of real time Korean won (KRW)–US dollar ($) exchange rates, this paper characterizes the volatility process of high frequency returns. The semi-parametric local Whittle estimation is applied to estimate the long memory dependency in the volatility process of the 5 min KRW–$ returns and the temporally aggregated returns data. The estimation results present that the underlying long memory dependency in the volatility process appears to be generally consistent across various temporally aggregated returns and that the exogenous shocks and the multiple breaks associated with the crisis in the market seem to induce greater long memory dependency during the crisis.     

Determinants of Malaysian Trade Balance: An ARDL Bound Testing Approach

Abstract

This paper examines the short- and long-run relationships between trade balance, real exchange rates, income and money supply in the case of Malaysia. The inclusion of income and money variables in the study is purposely to examine the monetary and absorption approaches to the balance of payments beside the conventional approach of elasticity, using exchange rates. Using the bound testing approach to cointegration and error correction models, developed within an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) framework, we investigate whether a long-run equilibrium relationship exists between trade balance and the determinants. Additionally, we adopt an innovation accounting by simulating variance decompositions (VDC) and impulse response functions (IRF) for further inferences. Using this approach, we find evidence of a long-run relationship between trade balance and income and money supply variables but not between trade balance and real exchange rate. The findings also suggest that Marshall–Lerner condition does not hold in the long-run for Malaysia and for policy wise the Malaysian trade balance/balance of payments should be viewed from absorption and monetary approaches.     

Exchange rates and the trade balance: the case of Singapore 1970 to 1996

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the real trade balance and the real exchange rate for bilateral trade in merchandise goods between Singapore and the USA on a quarterly basis over the period 1970 to 1996 using the partial reduced form model of Rose and Yellen (1989). We also hope to shed further light on what has become known as the ‘Singapore export puzzle’: the observation that, despite periods of rapid nominal and real appreciation of the Singapore dollar, export growth in aggregate has remained buoyant.Our findings suggest that the real exchange rate does not have a significant impact on the real bilateral trade balance for Singapore and the USA, thus confirming previous work which finds a weak relationship between changes in the exchange rate and changes in export and import prices and volumes for Singapore. We also found little evidence of a J-curve effect. Although positive coefficients linking real exports with lagged values of the real exchange rate might be indicative of ‘small country’ pricing by exporters in U.S. dollars, it is not clear that this is masking J-curve effects from an initial rise in import values as the home currency depreciates.     

中国对外双边贸易均衡影响因素的实证分析——基于中国与114国的相关面板数据

对外双边贸易失衡已严重制约中国对外贸易的健康发展。本文在回顾与评析贸易均衡已有研究的基础上,选取中国与114国在1995～2008年间的双边贸易面板数据,应用修正后的Zakir和Ismail(2010)模型来实证分析中国对外双边贸易均衡影响因素。结果表明,伙伴国与中国的相对实际国内生产总值和贸易加权距离增加将恶化中国贸易收支状况;伙伴国与中国的相对实际人均收入和双边实际汇率增加会改善中方贸易收支状况。据此,本文提出中国平衡对外双边贸易收支的地区与国别政策。     

实际汇率与居民消费风险分担的动态关系——基于预期的视角

通过考虑居民预期行为的作用，实际汇率与居民消费风险分担的动态关系是一个附带预期的渐进调整过程。在利用东亚9个主要经济体的数据对该关系进行研究后发现：（1）东亚各国居民之间的消费风险分担程度较低，但是从2000年之后，居民消费风险分担程度在逐渐提高；（2）实际汇率变动基本上没有平滑东亚各国（地区）居民的消费变动；（3）持有静态预期行为的居民朝向长期消费风险分担均衡的调整程度较小，并且该调整速度较慢，同时持有理性预期行为的居民、持有适应性预期行为的居民背离长期消费风险分担均衡的调整程度较大，并且该调整速度较快，这是造成非完全消费风险分担均衡的重要原因。     

Short-run and long-run effects of exchange rate change on trade balance: Evidence from China and its trading partners

As one of largest exporting countries in the world, China has experienced a large amount of trade surpluses for the past decade. However, a growing criticism has been focused on the manipulation of Chinese Yuan (RMB) exchange rate by the Chinese government. While China implemented the exchange rate reform policy in July 2005, the question, whether its currency is undervalued remains as a debatable issue. Different from previous studies by focusing on individual trading partners, this paper tests the short-run J-Curve hypothesis and long-run trade balance effect of real exchange rate between China and its eighteen major trading partners using a panel dataset over the 2005–2009 period. We adopt the methodologies of panel cointegration test, fully modified OLS for heterogeneous cointegrated panel (panel FMOLS) and panel error correction model (panel ECM) to investigate the above examination. Our empirical results lend support to the inverted J-curve hypothesis between China and its trading partners. However, we find that a real appreciation of RMB has a decreasing long-run effect on China's trade balance in only three of the eighteen trading partners, while it has an increasing long-run effect in five of the eighteen trading partners. These mixed findings, therefore, lead to the empirical evidence that the real appreciation of RMB has no overall long-run impact on China's trade balance.     

On the divergence between fuel and service prices: The importance of technological change and diffusion in an American frontier economy

This paper assembles heating fuel prices for the U.S. state of Vermont, from the colonial era to the present, in order to test whether energy fuel prices and energy service prices have diverged over this time period. Prior authors have reported evidence of a significant difference between long run energy fuel prices and energy service prices. However, this is the first analysis to pose this question beginning in the context of colonial America. In accord with earlier work focused in the U.K. the paper reports a significant divergence in fuel and service prices. In this setting real heating fuel prices increased over the 220 year time period by a factor of between 15 and 20. In contrast, heating service prices increased by a factor of two. Expressed in labor units, heating service prices have fallen in Vermont by 25%, while fuel prices were essentially flat. Finally, over this two century time period in Vermont and the U.K., the rate of change in service prices expressed in labor units is remarkably similar: − 1.1% and − 0.9%, per annum, respectively.     

Bilateral Trade Balances of Malaysia with Her 11 Largest Trading Partners: New Evidence from Asymmetry Cointegration

Research on the effects of exchange rate changes on the trade balance is now moving in a new direction, by investigating whether exchange rate changes have symmetric or asymmetric effects. The approach that relies upon separating depreciations from appreciations introduces nonlinearity into the adjustment process and relies upon the nonlinear ARDL approach of Shin et al. [2014. Modelling asymmetric cointegration and dynamic multipliers in a nonlinear ARDL framework, in: R. Sickels and W. Horrace (Eds), Festschrift in Honor of Peter Schmidt: Econometric Methods and Applications, 281–314 (Springer)]. When we applied this new method to the bilateral trade balances of Malaysia with each of her 11 largest partners, we found adjustment asymmetry in all models, short-run impact asymmetry effects and long-run asymmetry effects in the trade balance models between Malaysia and Asian countries.     

Changing Comparative Advantage,Real Exchange Rate Impact and Sino–Japanese Trade Fluctuations

China, as an important source country in the global value chain, especially in the East Asian production networks, has exerted significant influence on Sino–Japanese trade fluctuations. This paper explores the real factors that lead to the fluctuations in Sino–Japanese trade. Using the Hodrick–Prescott filter technique and OECD–WTO Statistics on Trade in Value Added from 1995 to 2011, the impact of the changing comparative advantage between the two countries is also examined. The empirical results indicate that determinants of the fluctuations in Sino–Japapese trade include changing comparative advantages, the volatility of the real exchange rate and quite a few external shocks. Some policy suggestions are put forward in regards to the stability of trade between the two countries.     

Should East Asia’s currencies be pegged to the yen? The role of invoice currency

Growing concern that a dollar peg exposes East Asian economies to fluctuations in the dollar–yen exchange rate has stimulated research on currency basket regimes as alternatives for these economies. However, existing studies have mostly ignored an important characteristic of East Asia, i.e., most of its international trade is invoiced in the U.S. dollars. This paper investigates how the preponderance of dollar invoicing affects optimal currency basket regimes for East Asian economies. I develop a three-country center-periphery sticky-price dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for the analysis. The model is solved numerically by taking second-order approximations to the policy functions with the expected lifetime utility of households chosen as the welfare criterion. Contrary to the conjecture of existing literature, I show that predominance of dollar invoicing implies that the dollar should receive a smaller weight than suggested by bilateral trade shares between emerging markets in East Asia and the United States. The results hinge on the interaction of different degrees of pass-through implied by the choice of invoice currency and endogenous responses of monetary policies in the center countries.