Exchange Rate Pass-Through in Industrialized Countries

Economists' long-standing interest in the degree to which exchange rate movements are reflected in prices was rekindled in the 1970s by a combination of rising inflation and the adoption of more flexible exchange rate regimes in many industrialized countries. Specifically, there were concerns that a large currency depreciation could degenerate into an inflationary spiral. Such fears were curtailed in the 1980s and early 1990s as industrialized countries began to reduce and stabilize their inflation rates. The low-inflation period most industrialized countries entered approximately a decade ago coincided with significant exchange rate depreciations that had much smaller effects on consumer prices than expected. This led to a belief that the extent to which exchange rate movements are passed through to consumer prices has declined. In this article, the authors examine why pass-through could be incomplete and review empirical estimates to determine whether pass-through has indeed declined, suggesting possible reasons for this decline and discussing the implications for monetary policy.

Exchange Rate Pass-Through and the Inflation Environment in Industrialized Countries: An Empirical Investigation

This paper investigates the question of whether a transition to a low-inflation environment, induced by a shift in monetary policy, results in a decline in the degree of pass-through of exchange rate movements to consumer prices. It differs from previous empirical work in its focus on the identification of changes in the inflation environment and its use of a panel-data approach. Evidence from a panel-data set of 11 industrialized countries over the period from 1977 to 2001, supports the hypothesis that exchange rate pass-through declines with a shift to a low-inflation environment brought about by a change in the monetary policy regime. More specifically, the results suggest that pass-through to import, producer, and consumer price inflation declined following the inflation stabilization that occurred in many industrialized countries in the early 1990s but did not decline following a similar episode in the 1980s. Several potential explanations for this finding are discussed, including the possibility that changes in the monetary policy regimes implemented in the 1990s were perceived as more credible than those carried out in the 1980s, and the possibility that the credibility of the new monetary policy regimes was acquired over time.Inflation and Prices, Exchange Rates, International Topics

Exchange Rate Regimes in Emerging Markets

A series of major international financial crises in the 1990s, and the recent introduction of the euro, have renewed interest in alternative exchange rate systems. The choice of exchange rate regime is particularly relevant for emerging-market countries because other countries are perceived either as having no alternative to their current exchange rate arrangement or as highly unlikely to change. This article examines the evolution of exchange rate regimes in emerging markets over the past decade and compares the strengths and weaknesses of the various available systems. These include intermediate regimes, such as the adjustable pegged exchange rate popular throughout much of the post-war period, and the two extreme exchange rate regimes: permanently fixed or freely floating exchange rate regimes. Two recently proposed alternatives are also evaluated: the Managed Floating Plus and Baskets, Bands, and Crawling Pegs. Both try to combine the best elements of the flexible and fixed exchange rate systems, but the Managed Floating Plus is deemed to be the more promising alternative.

Has Exchange Rate Pass-Through Really Declined? Some Recent Insights from the Literature

Building on an earlier Review article, the authors critically reassess the premise that exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) has declined in light of recent studies of the issue in the context of a dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium framework. This recent work helps to emphasize the pitfalls of previous studies based on reduced-form models. For example, ERPT to import prices may be larger than the estimated parameters of reduced-form models would indicate. On the other hand, the authors find fairly convincing evidence that measured short-run ERPT to consumer prices has declined because of a shift to more credible monetary policy regimes. In this case, the findings from DSGE models confirm the results from reduced-form models. Insights from recent studies of ERPT based on microdata are examined, and policy implications are discussed.

Macroprudential Rules and Monetary Policy when Financial Frictions Matter

This paper examines the interaction between monetary policy and macroprudential policy and whether policy makers should respond to financial imbalances. To address this issue, we build a dynamic general equilibrium model that features financial market frictions and financial shocks as well as standard macroeconomic shocks. We estimate the model using Canadian data. Based on these estimates, we show that it is beneficial to react to financial imbalances. The size of these benefits depends on the nature of the shock where the benefits are larger in the presence of financial shocks that have broader effects on the macroeconomy.Economic models; Financial markets; Financial stability; Monetary policy framework

Household Borrowing and Spending in Canada

Understanding how much of the increased debt load of Canadian households has been used to finance household spending on consumption and home renovation is important for the conduct of monetary policy. In this article, the authors use a comprehensive data set that provides information on the uses of debt by Canadian households. They first present some facts regarding the evolution of Canadian household debt over the period from 1999 to 2010, emphasizing the increased importance of debt flows that are secured by housing. They then explore how Canadian households have used their borrowed funds over the same period, and assess the role of these borrowed funds in financing total consumption and spending on home renovation. Finally, they examine the possible effects of a decline in house prices on consumption when housing equity is used as collateral against household indebtedness.

The Transmission of Shocks to the Chinese Economy in a Global Context: A Model-Based Approach

To better understand the dynamics of the Chinese economy and its interaction with the global economy, the authors incorporate China into an existing model for the G-3 economies (i.e., the United States, the euro area, and Japan), paying particular attention to modelling the exchange rate and monetary policy in China. Their findings suggest that the Chinese economy adjusts more slowly to shocks, compared to the large advanced economies, because monetary policy is less effective and the real exchange rate more persistent. In addition, the authors’ model underscores the importance of spillovers from China to the G-3 economies, and vice versa, thus highlighting the need to analyze the Chinese economy in a global context.Economic models; International topics; Business fluctuations and cycles; Exchange rate regimes

Multilateral Adjustment and Exchange Rate Dynamics: The Case of Three Commodity Currencies

In this paper, we empirically investigate whether multilateral adjustment to large U.S. external imbalances can help explain movements in the bilateral exchange rates of three commodity currencies -- the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand (ACNZ) dollars. To examine the relationship between exchange rates and multilateral adjustment, we develop a new regimeswitching model that augments a standard Markov-switching framework with a threshold variable. This enables us to model the exchange rate dynamics of our commodity currencies in the context of two regimes: one in which multilateral adjustment to large U.S. external imbalances is an important factor driving the commodity currencies and the second in which there are no significant U.S. external imbalances and hence multilateral adjustment is not a factor. We compare the performance of this model, both in and out-of-sample, to several other alternative models. In addition to developing this new model, another distinguishing feature of our paper is that we estimate all of our models using a Bayesian approach. We opt for a Bayesian approach in this context because it provides a simpler and more intuitive means of evaluating and comparing our different non-nested models. Moreover, it is relatively straightforward using a Bayesian approach to evaluate the importance of nonlinearities in the relationship between exchange rates and multilateral adjustment. Our findings suggest that during periods of large U.S. imbalances, fiscal and external, an exchange rate model for the ACNZ dollars should allow for multilateral adjustment effects. Moreover, we also find evidence to suggest that the adjustment of exchange rates to multilateral adjustment factors is best modelled as a non-linear process.Exchange rates; Econometric and statistical methods

Explaining and Forecasting Inflation in Emerging Markets: The Case of Mexico

The authors apply existing inflation models that have worked well in industrialized countries to Mexico, an emerging market that has recently moved to adopt an inflation-targeting framework for monetary policy. They compare the performance of these models with a mark-up model that has been used extensively to analyze inflation in Mexico. The authors focus on three models that have some theoretical foundations and that can therefore help explain the causes of inflation as well as be used for forecasting purposes: a mark-up model, a money-gap model, and a Phillips curve. The authors' empirical results suggest that the evolution of the exchange rate remains a very important factor for forecasting inflation in Mexico. Indeed, in the best-performing model, the mark-up model, the exchange rate plays the most significant role. The Phillips curve explains and forecasts inflation well when using actual values for the explanatory variables, but does not perform well when using forecasted values for the explanatory variables. The money-gap model does not appear to be useful in its current form, because it is unable to beat even a simple AR1.Inflation and prices; International topics

How fast can China grow? The middle kingdom's prospects to 2030

Given its size and importance for global commodity markets, the question of how fast the Chinese economy can grow over the medium term is an important one. This paper addresses this question by examining the evolution of the supply side of the Chinese economy over history and projecting how it will evolve over the next 15 years. Using a Cobb-Douglas production function, we decompose the growth of trend GDP into those of the capital stock, labour, human capital and total factor productivity (TFP) and then forecast trend output growth out to 2030 using a bottom-up approach based on forecasts that we build for each one of these factors. Our paper distinguishes itself from existing work in that we construct a forecast of Chinese TFP growth based on the aggregation of forecasts of its key determinants. Moreover, our analysis is based on a carefully constructed estimate of the Chinese productive capital stock and a measure of human capital - based on Chinese wage survey data - that better reflects the returns to education in China. Our results suggest that Chinese trend output growth will decelerate from around 7% currently to about 5% by 2030, and are consistent with a gradual rebalancing of the Chinese economy characterized by a decline in the investment rate