Exchange Rate Pass-Through in Turkey : It is Slow, but is it Really Low?

Abstract

Using a vector auto-regression (VAR) setup, we estimate the pass-through from exchange rates and import prices to domestic inflation in Turkey, and produce some stylized facts regarding the degree and the adjustment speed of the pass-through on several price measures. Estimations for two distinct periods-before and after the adoption of floating exchange rate regime-yield both good and bad news. The good news is, our impulse responses confirm the common conjecture that pass-through has weakened and slowed down after the adoption of floating exchange rate regime. The bad news is, surprisingly low pass-through in recent years partly owes to the fact that exchange rate shocks were not persistent in direction. In other words, total pass-through might have been sizable had the economy been hit by one-sided shocks such as a persistent depreciation.