The Impact Of Exchange Rate Misalignment And Volatility On Malaysian Trade Flows

This study empirically examines the influence of real exchange rate behaviors, explicitly in term of its misalignment and volatility on the trade flows of a small fastgrowing economy, particularly Malaysia by employing Johansen multivariate errorcorrection model as well as autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) to capture the estimates of the long-run and short-run relationships over the quarterly data for the period of 1991:1 to 2003:4. A measure of the quantitative proxy of the real exchange rate misalignment is constructed through the NATREX model while the volatility of real exchange rate is generated from the GARCH (1,1) model. It is particularly crucial because international trade played as main engine to generate and sustain economic growth for small open economies. A number of important conclusions can be drawn from the study. It is observed that the Malaysian real exchange rate was overvalued before the eruption of the Asian financial crisis in 1993-1997. After the crisis, the rate was undervalued in the mid 1997-2003. The rate was stable prior to the crisis, but was very volatile during the crisis period. The empirical finding shows that the Malaysia’s exports and imports are more sensitive to exchange rate misalignment throughout the sample-study period. In the meantime, exchange rate volatility appears to be most harmful to the Malaysia’s exports and imports in the post-sample period during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. On the other hand, the income effect provide a conducive condition to further boost Malaysia’s exports and imports as increase in the foreign and domestic income, respectively. For the price effect, Malaysia seems to offer a competitive price of export in pre-crisis period while Malaysia’s import is price inelastic through the sample period, where as a small open economy, Malaysia acts as a price taker in the international market. Nevertheless, the shift to a fixed or pegged exchange rate system is an appropriate measure as it reduced magnitude of the exchange rate misalignment and volatility (as computed through ATSSE and ATSCSD, respectively), where it may seem to be a successful case of crisis management in a small open dynamic economy, namely Malaysia

Exchange rate misalignment and economic growth: recent evidence in Malaysia

The present study aims at investigating the growth effects of real exchange rate misalignments in Malaysia over the period 1991:1-2009:4. The RER misalignment is built through the estimation of the NATREX equilibrium model. Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration framework, the results indicate the presence of positive and significant relationship between the RER misalignment and economic growth. This finding obtained is consistent with the notion that the RER misalignment through the distortion in relative price has systematic influence on the pattern of economic development

Exchange rate regime, exchange rate variability and flows of Malaysia's foreign trade

This article empirically evaluates Malaysian foreign trade effects through two types of exchange rate variability; misalignments and volatility across different exchange rate regimes from 1991:Q1 to 2003:Q4. The Natural Real Exchange Rate (NATREX) equilibrium model is employed to generate the real exchange rate misalignment while the GARCH (1, 1) model is used to measure the real exchange rate volatility, which is then tested in a model of Malaysian imports and exports. This paper differs from existing literature as the effects of exchange rate misalignment significantly hastened the level of Malaysian exports and imports for the periods, managed floating and pegged rate. On the other hand, the exchange rate volatility has merely promoted the Malaysian exports and imports during the implementation of pegged rate. This proposes that the variability of exchange rate and exchange rate regimes are important determinants in inspiring Malaysian foreign trade, especially during the 1997 financial crisis when the economic is distressed

Exchange rate misalignment, volatility and import flows in Malaysia

This paper investigates the effect of real exchange rate misalignment and volatility on Malaysian import flows during 1991:Q1 to 2003:Q4. A measure of the quantitative proxy of the real exchange rate misalignment is constructed using the Natural Real Exchange Rate (NATREX) equilibrium model, whereas the volatility of real exchange rate is generated from the GARCH model. This paper differs from existing literature as the effects of exchange rate misalignment significantly hastened the level of Malaysian imports for period of the study. The empirical results also show that the exchange rate volatility has merely promoted the Malaysian imports during the crisis period. This suggests that the exchange rate misalignment and volatility are important determinants in inspiring Malaysian import flows, especially during the 1997 Asian financial crisis

Dutch disease effect of oil price on agriculture sector: evidence from panel cointegration of oil exporting countries

This study aims to investigate the long-run relationship between oil price and value-added share of GDP of agriculture in 25 oil-exporting countries. We use the panel heterogeneous cointegration test and fully modified OLS (FMOLS), dynamic (OLS) and pooled mean group (PMG) methods to examine the long-run effect of real oil price and real exchange rate on agriculture. The result of the Pedroni cointegration exposes the long-run relationship between the variables under study. Panel cointegration estimators show the negative and significant effect of oil price and exchange rate on agriculture value added. These results indicate the existence of the Dutch disease and de-agriculturalization in oil-exporting economies. The present study contributes to existing literature that concentrates on the Dutch disease and di-agriculturalization by analyzing the effect of real oil price and real exchange rate on the agricultural sector in the long- and short-run in developing oil-exporting countries

Institutional quality and foreign direct investment in ASEAN

This study aims to investigate the role of institutional quality in influencing foreign direct investment. It employs two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression analysis to minimise the risk of bias due to endogeneity issue. Institutional quality is proxied by its ratio and gap to capture simultaneous changes in institutional quality of two countries under study. The results show that institutional quality matters for foreign direct investment. More importantly, although ratio of institutional quality is statistically significant, the actual improvement in host country’s institutional quality still depends on the changes in the competing country’s institutional quality. In other words, changes in the country’s institutional quality must be significantly greater than that of the competing country to assure that host country’s changes can be attractive for foreign direct investment. It should be cautioned that institutional quality is a necessary but not a sufficient precondition to attract FDI

The effect of foreign currency borrowing and financial development on exports: a dynamic panel analysis on Asia-Pacific countries

This paper examines the effect of foreign currency borrowing and financial development on exports. A balanced panel data is constructed for the selected 17 East Asian-Pacific countries, and the cointegration relationship among the variables of the export demand function is verified using Pedroni's heterogeneous panel cointegration tests. The empirical results indicate that the effect of foreign debt on exports is conditional on the magnitude of currency depreciation. The larger the depreciation of a currency, the more its exports are adversely affected by its foreign liability. This finding might be a possible explanation as to why large exchange rate depreciation during the 1997 financial crisis failed to generate the export boom. The results also show different effects of financial shocks on exports in these economies

Export, Economic Integration and Exchange Rate Volatility in Turkey and Malaysia

Using annual data (1970-2004), this study re-examined the hypothesis that exchange rate volatility may dampen export demand in Malaysia and Turkey. In particular, this study attempts to investigate the impact of exchange rate volatility on exports after taking into consideration the presence of regional economic integration. In addition, the role of regional economic integration in promoting export is also of concern to this study. The empirical evidence demonstrates that despite the significant, minimal impact of membership to regional economic integration for both economies, regional integration remains an important and valid approach for future economic development for both economies. Meanwhile, similar to the findings of previous studies the impact of exchange rate volatility on exports is consistently negative. However, it is no longer significant in the case of Turkey

Estimating efficiency in domestic and foreign Islamic banking and its determinants among three neighboring countries - Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei

This study attempts to investigate the technical efficiency (TE) of domestic and foreign Islamic banks and its determinants for three neighborhood countries namely Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei that spans over the period from 2006 to 2014.This study employs a two stage procedure involving data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to measure banks’ efficiency while the parametric (t-test) and non-parametric (Mann-Whitney [Wilcoxon] and Kruskall-Wallis) to guage the difference in the efficiency between the domestic and foreign Islamic banks. Then, ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions is utilized to analyzed the determinants of technical efficiency. The results show that domestic Islamic bank for all countries exhibit significantly higher technical efficiency than foreign Islamic banks, which is consistent with home field advantage theory. The regressions on determinants results indicate that bank size and management quality have a negative and significant relationship with technical efficiency of Islamic banks, whereas market power and liquidity indicate a significantly positive relationship with technical efficiency of Islamic banks. The findings of this study give the banks’ stakeholders, regulators, banks’ managers and investors an important insight about the technical efficiency of Islamic banks and its significant determinants

The impact of foreign-direct investment on economic growth in Malaysia: the role of financial development

This paper investigates the impact of foreign-direct investment (FDI) and financial development on economic growth in Malaysia over the period of 1975-2014. According to autoregressive distributed lag bound test approach to co integration analyses, the results found that financial development plays an essential role in mediating the impact of FDI on economic growth in Malaysia. This implies that well-developed financial sectors lead to further and facilitate FDI spill over and hence yield economic growth, particularly for the case of Malaysia