The Impact of Real Exchange Rate Flexibility on East Asian Exports

The Impact of Real Exchange Rate Flexibility on East Asian Exports
Author: Mizanur Rahman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN:

This paper estimates the impact of intra-regional real exchange rate flexibility on East Asian exports. The hypothesis is that the impact would be negative for East Asian countries regardless of their exchange rate regimes. The results validate the hypothesis. The findings show that for Chinese exports the long-run effect is as much as that of a real appreciation of renminbi. By contrast, for Japanese exports the effect is three times larger than that of a real appreciation of the yen. The findings imply that a regional currency basket mechanism would lessen the adverse effect of exchange rate flexibility and engineer a collective exchange rate adjustment for resolving the global payment imbalance against East Asia.

Current Account Rebalancing and Real Exchange Rate Adjustment Between the U.S. and Emerging Asia

Current Account Rebalancing and Real Exchange Rate Adjustment Between the U.S. and Emerging Asia
Author: Ms.Isabelle Mejean
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 31
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1455218960

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.

Toward an East Asian Exchange Rate Regime

Toward an East Asian Exchange Rate Regime
Author: Duck-Koo Chung
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2007-05-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0815714181

East Asian exchange rates have become a global flashpoint. U.S. policymakers blame artificially low Asian currency values for global imbalances, including America's ballooning current account deficit. The solution, they argue, lies in some combination of greater exchange rate flexibility and the appreciation of Asian currencies against the dollar. Asian officials recognize the need to let their exchange rates rise, but they fear that would hamper growth and cut sharply into the value of their dollar reserves. Toward an East Asian Exchange Rate Regime offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of the resulting debates, drawing on expertise from China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. The introduction reviews the issues at stake, sketches a variety of proposed exchange rate regimes, and discusses comparisons between East Asia and the West. Subsequent chapters examine the connection between global financial imbalances and East Asian monetary cooperation, China's potential role in regional coordination, the relationship between monetary and trade integration, and different paths toward regional cooperation. Authoritative yet concise, this is an essential primer on East Asian monetary integration. Contributors include Gongpil Choi (Korean Institute of Finance, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco), Masahiro Kawai (University of Tokyo, Asian Development Bank), Kwanho Shin (Korea University), Yunjong Wang (SK Institute), Masaru Yoshitomi (RIETI,Tokyo), and Yongding Yu (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences).

Trade Patterns and Exchange Rates in East Asia

Trade Patterns and Exchange Rates in East Asia
Author: Mizanur Rahman
Publisher: CreateSpace
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2012-06-30
Genre:
ISBN: 9781514305942

In his Testimony on June 23 2005 before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, remarked, "The enhanced integration of China into the world trading system is having notable effect on Asia's trade with the rest of the world and on trade within Asia. After having risen rapidly through the 1990s, U.S. imports from Asia excluding China have flattened since 2000. This has occurred as production within Asia has evolved, with the final stages of assembly and exporting to the United States and elsewhere becoming increasingly concentrated in China." The phenomenon is called East Asian production networks whereby production processes are fragmented across national borders in the region. This development is undeniably related to the global imbalance problem. Several studies showed that the build-up of an unsustainable payment imbalance in the U.S. was substantially mirrored in the reserve accumulation by East Asian countries including China notably. These studies predicted that unless "coordination and shared responsibility" led to a gradual adjustment of it, the world economy would move toward a major crisis. Some authors even predicted an imminent collapse of the U.S. dollar, and a global financial meltdown. A global financial crisis indeed began in 2008. The crisis has accompanied a prolonged economic slowdown across the developed and developing world. An unwinding of the imbalance has progressed but in a disorderly way. The moral of this research is that real exchange rate changes and redistribution of world expenditures will continue to play key role in the process of international adjustment. However, our focus would be on how it would affect East Asian exports within the region and between East Asia and the rest of the world. We apply an empirical framework that essentially incorporates the fact that production within Asia has evolved. The consideration has an important implication. It is that exports by country are recorded on a gross basis rather than as value added and therefore the domestic value added is only a part of the gross value of the exports. An appreciation by the exporting country per se will affect only the domestic value added but not the gross value. But a joint appreciation of countries supplying intermediate goods will increase the dollar cost of intermediate goods imported into the exporting country from the rest of Asia, which represents a significant share of the gross value. This was the conjecture of Alan Greenspan. He argued that such a coordinated exchange appreciation would have larger effect on East Asian exports. In fact, East Asian exchange rates are now on a path of real appreciation but in an environment of no explicit coordination. The question is how changes in intra-regional real exchange rates will affect trade along the production networks and final exports from East Asia to the world. This study defines two channels of this effect. The first is the production linkage effect through fragmented value chain and the other is the competitive effect. A real appreciation of one East Asian country against the others will imply an adverse competitiveness effect but a favorable linkage effect. We further examine in this research the evolving trade patterns of East Asian countries. We do it by analyzing composition as well as comparative advantage of East Asian exports by stages of production and across geographic locations. The purpose is to see how production specialization has evolved across the core and peripheral countries within the region. We conduct the analyses for all East Asian countries and over 1985-2008 period. They include Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan comprising the core region and China and seven ASEAN countries comprising the peripheral region. The ASEAN countries are Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Viet Nam.

Exchange Rate Volatility and Exports

Exchange Rate Volatility and Exports
Author: Myint Moe Chit
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2008
Genre:
ISBN:

This thesis provides an empirical analysis of the impact of exchange rate volatility on the exports of five emerging East and South East Asian economies; China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. The countries under consideration are the main members of the impending ASEAN-China Free Trade Area (ACFTA), and the options for a closer monetary integration including proposais for the eventual formation of a currency union within the region are currently an active area of research and policy debate. Therefore, an understanding of the degree to which exchange rate volatility affects their export activity is important for setting the optimal exchange rate policy in emerging East Asian countries. Recognizing the specificity of the exports of the sample countries which is different from those of industrialised countries this study employs an augmented generalised gravity model instead of a pure gravity model. A GMM-IV approach is used to overcome the potential econometric problems of endogeneity and heteroskedasticity. In addition, this study is the first to conduct the recently developed panel unit-root and cointegration tests to verify the existence of a long-run stationary relationship between real exports and exchange-rate volatility. The benchmark measure of the exchange rate volatility which represents uncertainty is the standard deviation of the first difference of the logarithmic exchange rate. In order to check the robustness of the results two additional measures of exchange rate volatility - the moving average standard deviation of the logarithmic exchange rate (MASD) and the conditional exchange rate volatility which follows a Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedascity process (GARCH) are also used to estimate the model. The results provide a strong evidence that exchange rate volatility has an economically and statistically significant negative impact not only on the overall exports to the world market but also on the intra-regional exports of emerging East Asian countries. In addition, the results indicate that the adverse effect of exchange rate volatility on exports is not a linear and is conditional on the financial sector development of the exporting country: the more financially developed an economy is, the less its exports are adversely affected by exchange rate volatility. These results are robust across different estimation techniques and do not depend on the variable chosen to proxy exchange rate uncertainty. In conclusion, the results of the thesis suggest that whilst exchange rate flexibility has desirable properties as a 'shock absorber' to dampen the impact of real shocks, on average it still has an adverse effect on the exports of the emerging East Asian countries, and the impact is more severe on a financially less developed economy.

Exchange Rate Systems and Policies in Asia

Exchange Rate Systems and Policies in Asia
Author: Paul S. L. Yip
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2008
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9812834516

This important book comprises insightful papers on lessons learned from some major exchange rate and monetary experiences in Asia, exchange rate crisis management in Asia and choice of exchange rate systems in Asia. Originally published in the Singapore Economic Review, Vol. 52, No. 3, 2007, it deals primarily with the exchange rate systems and policies in the three largest economies in Asia: China, Japan and India. It also contains a paper on Singapore''s exchange rate system, whose success could make it a role model for other small open economies. Notable contributors include Ronald McKinnon and John Williamson, among others. The editor is the original designer of China''s latest exchange rate system reform.

Economic Interdependency and Exchange Rate Flexibility in East Asia

Economic Interdependency and Exchange Rate Flexibility in East Asia
Author: Mizanur Rahman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 11
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN:

This paper examines if exchange rate flexibility adversely affects trade integration of East Asian countries in general. The study focuses on China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. These countries pursue fixed, floating and intermediate regimes respectively. The hypothesis is that since the countries jointly organize East Asian production networks and conduct vertical intra-industry trade (VIIT), the impact of exchange rate flexibility would be negative irrespective of their exchange rate regimes. The results validate the hypothesis. The findings imply that East Asia rather than the domain of any national currency is an optimum currency area.

Proposed Strategy for a Regional Exchange Rate Arrangement in Post-crisis East Asia

Proposed Strategy for a Regional Exchange Rate Arrangement in Post-crisis East Asia
Author: Masahiro Kawai
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 52
Release: 2000
Genre: Foreign exchange rates
ISBN:

A coordinated action by East Asian countries to stabilize their currencies against a common basket of major currencies (broadly representative of their average structure of trade and foreign direct investment) would help stabilize both intraregional exchange rates and effective exchange rates, in a way consistent with the medium-term objective of promoting trade investment and growth in the region.

Are Chinese Exports Sensitive to Changes in the Exchange Rate?

Are Chinese Exports Sensitive to Changes in the Exchange Rate?
Author: Shaghil Ahmed
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
Total Pages: 53
Release: 2011-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1437930972

Builds a model of two types of Chinese exports, those processed and assembled from imported inputs ("processed" exports (PE)) and "non-processed" exports (NPE). When the source of the increase in the Chinese real exchange rate (CRER) is appreciation against the currencies of other emerging Asian trading partners, the effect on PE is positive but insignificant, while the effect on NPE is negative. By contrast, when the source of the increase in the CRER is appreciation against China's advanced-economy trading partners, the effects on both types of exports are negative. Thus greater exchange rate flexibility could contribute to lowering China's trade surplus through restraining growth of exports. Illustrations. A print on demand report.