Alternative Approaches To Real Exchange Rates And Real Interest Rates

"This book greatly enhances our understanding of the behavior of real exchange rates. It provides an elegant model based on a solid theoretical foundation that links real exchange rates to their fundamental economic determinants and takes proper account of stock and flow considerations. The authors provide a masterful account of how changes in productivity and thrift affect the real exchange rate, and show that the long-run impact depends crucially on whether the change reflects the former fundamental (investment) or the latter (consumption). The empirical implementation uses state-of-the-art cointegration and error correction methodologies that are eminently well suited to capture the short-run adjustment of the real exchange rate to its medium- to long-run equilibrium value. The empirical results are extremely encouraging, as the economic fundamentals identified by the authors can explain a substantial part of the movement in the real exchange rate of a number of countries."--Peter Clark, International Monetary Fund

A careful basic theoretical and econometric analysis of the factors determining the real exchange rates of Canada, the U.K., Japan, France and Germany with respect to the United States is conducted. The resulting conclusion is that real exchange rates are almost entirely determined by real factors relating to growth and technology such as oil and commodity prices, international allocations of world investment across countries, and underlying terms of trade changes. Unanticipated money supply shocks, calculated in five alternative ways have virtually no effects. A Blanchard-Quah VAR analysis also indicates that the effects of real shocks predominate over monetary shocks by a wide margin. The implications of these facts for the conduct of monetary policy in countries outside the U.S. are then explored leading to the conclusion that all countries, to avoid exchange rate overshooting, have tended to automatically follow the same monetary policy as the United States. The history of world monetary policy is reviewed along with the determination of real exchange rates within the Euro Area.

This paper presents a reduced-form model of the real exchange rate. Using multilateral cointegration methods, the model is implemented for the real effective exchange rates of the dollar, the mark, and the yen, over the period 1974-1993. In contrast to much other research using real exchange rates, there is evidence of significant and sensible long-run relationships for a simplified version as well as for the full version of the model. The estimated long-run relationships are used to produce dynamic equations, which outperform a random walk and produce sensible dynamic patterns in the context of an impulse response analysis.

This paper discusses exchange rate issues in advanced and in developing countries. For the determination of exchange rates among industrialized countries the key question is the following: What is the right framework -- the monetary approach, the equilibrium approach, the new classical approach or the macroeconomic model in the tradition of Mundell-Fleming. To shed light on that question two empirical problems are considered: What is known about the behavior of real exchange rates and how well do alternative models explain the relation among interest rates, expected depreciation and actual depreciation. The second half of the paper discusses real exchange rates in developing countries. This strand of literature has become important in the context of adjustment programs. We focus on the relation between real exchange rates and the profitability of capital. The model highlights the sharp discrepancy between the mobility of capital (even physical capital, in the long run) and the immobility of labor.

How successful is PPP, and its extension in the monetary model, as a measure of the equilibrium exchange rate? What are the determinants and dynamics of equilibrium real exchange rates? How can misalignments be measured, and what are their causes? What are the effects of specific policies upon the equilibrium exchange rate? The answers to these questions are important to academic theorists, policymakers, international bankers and investment fund managers. This volume encompasses all of the competing views of equilibrium exchange rate determination, from PPP, through other reduced form models, to the macroeconomic balance approach. This volume is essentially empirical: what do we know about exchange rates? The different econometric and theoretical approaches taken by the various authors in this volume lead to mutually consistent conclusions. This consistency gives us confidence that significant progress has been made in understanding what are the fundamental determinants of exchange rates and what are the forces operating to bring them back in line with the fundamentals.

This paper empirically examines the long-run relationship between real exchange rates and real interest rate differentials over the recent floating exchange rate period, using a panel cointegration method, with data for a set of industrialized countries. The paper finds evidence of statistically significant long-run relationships and plausible point estimates, which contrasts with much existing evidence. The failure of others to establish such relationships may reflect the estimation method they use rather than any inherent deficiency of the fundamentals-based models.

This book collects together the basic documents of an approach to the theory and policy of the balance of payments developed in the 1970s. The approach marked a return to the historical traditions of international monetary theory after some thirty years of departure from them – a departure occasioned by the international collapse of the 1930s, the Keynesian Revolution and a long period of war and post-war reconstruction in which the international monetary system was fragmented by exchange controls, currency inconvertibility and controls over international trade and capital movements.

Despite the centrality of the theoretical relationship between real exchange rates and real interest rates differential in open economy macroeconomics, its empirical evidence, particularly when cointegration methods are used, is rather mixed. The study uses IFS, IMF data for India and US for the period of 1993:M04 to 2003:M09. It employs both Engle-Granger and Johansen tests for presence of cointegration. However, it could not found empirical support in favour of the above relationship. The result is robust for different measures of real interest rate differentials.