This paper revisits the association between exchange rates and monetary fundamentals with the focus on both linear and nonlinear approaches. With the monthly data of Euro/US dollar and Japanese yen/US dollar, our linear analysis demonstrates the monetary model is a long-run description of exchange rate movements, and our nonlinear modelling suggests the error correction model describes the short-run adjustment of deviations of exchange rates, and monetary fundamentals are capable of explaining exchange rate dynamics under an unrestricted framework.
The US trade deficit with China has existed for a long time, and its dollar value has been on the rise recently. It is widely believed that the main culprit is the manipulated value of Renminbi relative to the US dollar. Towards that end, this article re-examines the spot exchange rate and bilateral trade nexus using the Fourier approximation and a variant of the well-known gravity model during the sample period 1993: q1–2014: q1. Although China’s exports to the US Granger cause the exchange rate in a co-integrated space, the findings of a vector error correction model indicate that there is not a strong relation between the two. Indeed, within the aforementioned sample, only 15.52 per cent of changes in China’s exports to the USA are attributable to changes in the spot exchange rate. This is noticeably much smaller than impacts of the other variables utilized in the estimated gravity model. As such, the palpable trade imbalance between the USA and China cannot be single-handedly blamed on the spot exchange rate manipulations.
Before the world economic crisis the Chinese government restricted the sphere of the Yuan’s circulation exceptionally by the domestic market. Basically, until that time the Yuan was not freely convertible while the Chinese foreign trade transactions were operated with the help of the US dollar. This is a sufficient reason to state that the issue of Yuan’s underestimated exchange rate has no fundamental relevance. However, the crisis forced China to substantially extend the utilization of its national currency in the international settlements. This is especially true in case of mutual settlements with the neighbor countries. So far, presumably, the issue of Yuan’s underestimated exchange rate will, at last, receive a scientific validity only when the Chinese national currency will become fully convertible and the scales of its utilization will become comparable with those of the traditional hard currencies.
Long Memory and Fractional Integration in High Frequency Data on the US Dollar/British Pound Spot Exchange Rate