A Synthesis of the Effects of Exchange Rate Volatility on International Trade: A Meta-Regression Analysis

ABSTRACT

This article surveys literature that investigates the effects of exchange rate volatility on international trade. We perform meta-regression analysis on 41 studies with 807 estimates. We show that the empirical works exhibit substantial publication selection and show a significant genuine exchange rate volatility effect on trade flows after correction of publication bias. In addition, the literature reveals a pronounced heterogeneity with respect to model specifications, samples, time horizons, and countries’ characteristics. These findings are supported by separate assessment of primary studies with, respectively, total exports and sectoral exports as the dependent variable.     

Exchange-Rate Volatility,Exchange-Rate Regime,and Trade in OIC Countries

The authors examine the impact of exchange rate volatility on trade in the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) countries from 1995 to 2008 using panel estimations to distinguish differences between disaggregate trade, and examine its threshold effects. Results reveal that exchange rate volatility generally has significant negative effect on export and import with lag. However, exports of OIC with flexible exchange rate regime have significant positive exposure to exchange rate volatility. The authors also document a threshold effect for countries with trade value constitutes more than 30% of the real gross domestic product, and the exchange rate volatility becomes significant positive for export but significant negative for import with lag.     

Exchange Rate Volatility and International Trade Flows in sub-Saharan Africa: Empirical Evidence

In this article, the authors examine the relationship between the volatility in exchange rates and the volume of international trade in sub-Saharan African countries. Using the gravity equation and annual data for the period 1998–2007, they find a statistically significant and negative correlation between the volatility in exchange rates and the volume of trade. The estimated elasticities show that the responsiveness of the flow of international trade to changes in exchange rate volatility is very small. This suggests that eliminating the volatility in the exchange rates will result in only small increments in the volume of trade. Accordingly, pursuing a policy of exchange rate stability would not be sufficient to significantly increase the volume of bilateral trade in the sub-Saharan African region.     

Exchange Rate Volatility and Exports: New Empirical Evidence from the Emerging East Asian Economies

This paper examines the impact of bilateral real exchange rate volatility on real exports of five emerging East Asian countries among themselves as well as to 13 industrialised countries. We recognise the specificity of the exports between the emerging East Asian and industrialised countries and employ a generalised gravity model. In the empirical analysis we use a panel comprising 25 years of quarterly data and perform unit‐root and cointegration tests to verify the long‐run relationship among the variables. The results provide strong evidence that exchange rate volatility has a negative impact on the exports of emerging East Asian countries. In addition, the results suggest that the pattern of bilateral exports is influenced by third‐country variables. An increase in the price competitiveness of other emerging East Asian countries has a negative impact on a country’s exports to a destination market, but the magnitude of the impact is relatively small. These results are robust across different estimation techniques and do not depend on the variable chosen to proxy exchange rate uncertainty. The results of the GMM‐IV estimation also confirm the negative impact of exchange rate volatility on exports and suggest that this negative relationship is not driven by simultaneous causality bias.     

Determinants of Export Diversification Around the World: 1962–2000

Using a large dataset for 79 countries covering the period 1962–2000, this study analyses the main determinants of export diversification (concentration). We explore the role of several factors and we use three different indicators of export concentration. We find robust evidence across specifications and indicators that trade openness induces higher specialisation. In contrast, financial development does not seem to help countries to diversify their exports. Looking at the effects of exchange rates, in some of the results, a negative effect of real exchange rate volatility on export diversification is detected, but no significant effects of exchange rate overvaluation. There is also evidence that human capital accumulation contributes positively to diversify exports and that increasing remoteness tends to reduce export diversification. We also explore the role of terms of trade shocks. Most of the results suggest an interesting interaction between this variable and human capital: improvements in the terms of trade tend to concentrate exports, but this effect is lower for those countries with higher levels of human capital. This evidence suggests that countries with higher education can take advantage of positive terms of trade shocks to increase export diversification.     

Impact of exchange rates on ASEAN's trade in the era of global value chains: An empirical assessment

ABSTRACT

Exchange rate risk remains a key concern for export-oriented economies in Southeast Asia. Traditionally, export performance is thought to be adversely affected by exchange rate appreciation and high exchange rate volatility. Nonetheless, in the context of global value chains where export production relies heavily on imported inputs, the trade effects of exchange rate may be weakened. Using the OECD-WTO Trade in Value-added (TiVA) database, this paper seeks to tease out the association between exchange rate movements, volatility and aggregate exports of goods and services among ASEAN economies. More importantly, it investigates whether integration into GVCs affects these relationships. Applying panel regression techniques to a sample of eight ASEAN countries over the period 1995–2011, we found that high share of foreign value added (FVA) embodied in exports almost completely offsets the negative effect of an appreciation in the real effective exchange rate (REER) on real gross exports. At the same time, high FVA share also dampens the negative association between exports and increased REER volatility.     

Impact of Exchange Rate Uncertainty on Trade Flows: Evidence from Commodity Trade between the United States and the United Kingdom

Previous studies that investigated the impact of exchange rate volatility on the trade flows employed aggregate trade data and standard estimation techniques. They provided mixed results. In this paper we use disaggregated import and export data for 177 commodities traded between the United States and the United Kingdom to investigate whether volatility of the real bilateral dollar–pound exchange rate has any detrimental effect on trade flows at the commodity level. Additionally, we employ the bounds testing approach to cointegration and error‐correction modelling that is suitable for the models used mostly because it does not require pre‐unit‐root testing and variables in the model could be stationary, non‐stationary or a combination of the two. In most trade flow models estimated, we found a negative effect of exchange rate volatility on commodity trade.     

Exchange rate volatility and Turkish industry-level export: Panel cointegration analysis

The purpose of this article is to investigate the impact of the exchange rate volatility on Turkey's export. To this end, the panel cointegration analysis is applied to the data from Turkey's top 20 export industries to major 20 trading partners for the period 1980–2009. Special attention is paid to test for whether employment of country-level trade data instead of industry-level data is subject to the aggregation bias problem in the estimation of long-run cointegration parameters. The results indicate that employing country-level trade data suffers from the aggregation bias in estimating the cointegration parameters for the level of exchange rate and for the exchange rate volatility. The findings imply that (i) the impact of the exchange rate volatility on Turkish exports differs across industries, (ii) Turkey benefits from the depreciation of Turkish lira, and(iii) the foreign income plays a key role in determining the Turkish industry-level exports. The findings increase our insights to explain therecent dynamics of Turkish exports and provide some policy implications.     

The Effect of Real Exchange Rate Volatility on the Trade of Educational Services

This article finds that high levels of real exchange rate volatility between two trading partners significantly decrease the amount of educational services traded. Many academic institutions are actively looking to expand exports of educational services as a means of increasing revenues. Internal policies that reduce real exchange rate uncertainty may help encourage trade of educational services between countries where volatility is high. The discovery that real exchange rate volatility serves as a significant barrier to attracting educational export opportunities to certain countries underscores an obstacle that should and/or could be addressed as academic institutions strive to expand their international enrollments.     

Determinants of China's bilateral trade balance in global value chains

This paper identifies the determinants of China's bilateral trade balance using a new measure based on international input–output data, the so-called ‘trade in value-added’ (TiVA), which can prevent double counting in the estimation of bilateral trade balance. Our results show that using a measure based on gross exports, rather than TiVA, causes relatively large overestimation of the impact of the RMB exchange rate on China's bilateral trade balance. This overestimation is mainly because that the increasing production of exports may require increasing intermediate imports as a consequence of international fragmentation of production in global value chains. In addition, our results also show that the impact of FDI inflows on China's bilateral trade balances depends on the position and role of China and its trading partners in GVCs.     

Understanding bilateral exchange rate volatility

This paper develops an empirical model of bilateral exchange rate volatility. We conjecture that for developing economies, external financial liabilities have an important effect on desired bilateral exchange rate volatility, above and beyond the standard optimal currency area (OCA) factors. By contrast, industrial countries do not face the same set of constraints in international financial markets. In our theoretical model, external debt tightens financial constraints and reduces the efficiency of the exchange rate in responding to external shocks. We go on to explore the determinants of bilateral exchange rate volatility in a broad cross section of countries. For developing economies, bilateral exchange rate volatility (relative to creditor countries) is strongly negatively affected by the stock of external debt. For industrial countries however, OCA variables appear more important and external debt is generally not significant in explaining bilateral exchange rate volatility.     

The impact of parallel market exchange rate volatility and oil exports on real GDP in Syria: Evidence from the ARDL approach

This paper investigates the impact of parallel market exchange rate volatility and trade on real GDP and real GDP growth in the Syrian economy over the period of 1990Q1–2010Q4. To this end, we first construct a parallel market exchange rate volatility indicator. Second, we estimate an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model where we include our indicator of volatility among the main determinants of real GDP. Our findings imply that real GDP can be explained by three main variables: parallel market exchange rate, money supply, and oil exports. The long-run equilibrium reveals that parallel market exchange rate volatility has a negative impact on real GDP compared to the positive impact of money supply and oil exports. In contrast, the short-run impact of parallel market exchange rate volatility on real GDP growth is positive and very small counter to the long-run impact. Furthermore, the coefficient of the error correction term of the estimated ARDL model indicates that real GDP deviation from the equilibrium level will be corrected by about 10% after each quarter.     

Fixed exchange rates and trade

A classic argument for a fixed exchange rate is its promotion of trade. Empirical support for this, however, is mixed. While one branch of research consistently shows a small negative effect of exchange rate volatility on trade, another, more recent, branch presents evidence of a large positive impact of currency unions on trade. This paper helps resolve this disconnect. Our results, which use a new data-based classification of fixed exchange rate regimes, show a large, significant effect of a fixed exchange rate on bilateral trade between a base country and a country that pegs to it. These results suggest an economically relevant role for exchange rate regimes in trade determination since a significant amount of world trade is conducted between countries with fixed exchange rates.     

汇率风险如何影响中国对日本的出口

本文研究汇率风险对中国与日本的双边出口是否存在长期和短期的影响。使用多元JO-HANSEN协整检验法来检验汇率波动率与出口之间是否存在长期均衡关系。使用GRANGER非因果检验和脉冲响应函数检验短期影响是否存在。研究结果表明从长期看,汇率风险对出口没有影响,但是短期看,汇率风险确实会影响出口。     

Exchange Rate Volatility and Intra‐Asia Trade: Evidence by Type of Goods

This paper examines the impact of intra‐Asia exchange rate volatility on intra‐Asia trade in primary goods, intermediate goods, equipment goods and consumption goods from 1980 to 2009. For Asia, the evidence shows that as intraregional exchange rate volatility increases, intraregional exports in these goods fall. This adverse impact is even more pronounced in the subregion of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)+5 comprising ASEAN member countries plus the People's Republic of China; Hong Kong, China; Japan; the Republic of Korea; and Taipei, China; and especially among intermediate and equipment exports. Again, the impact magnifies in an even smaller subgroup excluding the smaller ASEAN economies. These results underline the significant impact of exchange rate volatility on the region's production networks. For South Asia, however, exchange rate volatility appears to have a positive impact on exports. Still, caution is warranted given that South Asian economies trade relatively little with each other.     

Trade intensity and purchasing power parity

In this paper, we seek to contribute to the PPP literature by presenting evidence of a link between trade intensity and exchange rate dynamics. We first establish a negative effect of trade intensity on exchange rate volatility using panel regressions, with distance as an instrument to correct for endogeneity. We also estimate a nonlinear model of mean reversion to compute half-lives of deviations of bilateral exchange rates from the levels dictated by relative PPP, and find these half-lives to be significantly shorter for high trade intensity currency pairs. This result does not appear to be driven by Central Bank intervention. Finally, we show that conditioning on PPP may help improve the performance of popular currency trading strategies, such as the carry trade, especially for low trade intensity currency pairs.     

贸易环境对我国出口影响的实证分析

以我国1995年1月至2009年10月出口贸易的月度数据为基础,实证分析了贸易环境的变化对我国出口的影响,结果显示:实际有效汇率的上升(人民币贬值)对我国一般贸易出口、加工贸易出口和制成品出口具有正面作用;汇率波动率越大,我国的出口贸易额就越少;我国出口贸易的收入弹性较高,一般贸易出口和制成品出口对收入的敏感性也较强;加入WTO、采取出口退税和人民币汇率改革3项贸易政策从长期来看,促进了我国出口贸易的增长。     

Flexible exchange rates and international trade: An empirical investigation of bilateral flows

This paper investigates the alleged adverse effect of floating exchange rates on international trade. A simple model is constructed to test the relationship between exchange rate variability and bilateral trade flows between the United States and three of its major trading partners: Canada, Japan and Germany. Using data from 1960 to 1983 to encompass both “stable” and floating rate regimes, it is shown that while exchange rate variability is considerably higher in the floating period, there is no evidence that this greater variability has had a negative impact on trade flows.     

Exchange rate fluctuations,firm size,and export behavior: an empirical investigation

In this paper, we examine how changes in the exchange rate and its volatility affect the export behavior of manufacturing firms. We also investigate whether both exchange rate changes and exchange rate volatility affect firms of different sizes differently. Applying the two-step system generalized method of moment estimator on our data for a sample of 221 Pakistani manufacturing firms, we find that the real exchange rate depreciation has positive impacts, whereas the exchange rate volatility has negative impacts on firms’ exports. We also find that compared to large-sized firms, small- and medium-sized exporting firms are more likely to benefit from currency depreciations. Yet, regarding the effect of exchange rate volatility, we find that the adverse impact of exchange rate volatility is weaker for large-sized firms as compared to small- and medium-sized firms. Our findings confirm the presence of nonlinearity in export-deterring (favoring) effects of exchange rate volatility (depreciation) on exporting behavior depending on firm size. Pakistan should design and implement export-favoring preferential policies by emphasizing on real exchange rate stabilization and providing incentives to large firms to come into being. Small- and medium-sized enterprises should develop such export strategies that help reduce their size disadvantages, particularly in managing exchange rate risks.     

Business cycle synchronisation in East Asia: The role of value‐added trade

We empirically investigate the relationship between business cycle synchronisation and the role of value‐added trade focusing on a panel of 12 Asian countries from 1995 to 2011. In addition, we propose the inclusion of two novel determinants, for example external value‐added trade intensity and exchange rate volatility and also saturate our empirical model with other common determinants found in the literature. Our findings first confirm that value‐added trade intensity, rather than gross trade intensity, has a sizable, positive and statistically significant impact on synchronisation among East Asian countries. Second, the exchange rate volatility has a significant negative effect on the business cycle synchronisation, which verifies that the exchange rate volatility is another important determinant of business cycle synchronisation. Our findings have important implications for the monetary cooperation in the region: strengthening trade linkage could reduce the costs of monetary cooperation by increasing the incidence of symmetric shocks.