Exchange Rate Volatility and Exports: New Empirical Evidence from the Emerging East Asian Economies

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of bilateral real exchange rate volatility on real exports of five emerging East Asian countries among themselves as well as to thirteen industrialised countries. We explicitly recognize the specificity of the exports between the emerging East Asian and industrialised countries and employ a generalized gravity model that combines a traditional long-run export demand model with gravity type variables. In the empirical analysis we use a panel comprising 25 years of quarterly data and perform unit-root and cointegration tests to verify the long-run relationship among the regression variables. The results provide strong evidence that exchange rate volatility has a negative impact on the exports of emerging East Asian countries. These results are robust across different estimation techniques and do not depend on the variable chosen to proxy exchange rate uncertainty.