How Structural Macroeconomic Shocks Can Explain Exchange Rate Pass-Through in Developing Countries: A Common Trend Approach

This paper investigates the exchange rate pass-through in 12 developing countries during the period 1980-2001 by adopting a new formulation. Rather than considering the traditional approach based on the exogenous exchange rate movement through correlation between exchange rate and prices, we focus on fundamental macroeconomic shocks that affect both exchange rate and prices. In order to do that, we employ long-run restrictions à la Blanchard and Quah (1989) to identify the different shocks through an open economic macroeconomic model (ISLM framework). We use the common trends approach proposed by Warne et al (1992). This allows us to calculate the pass-through as the responses of the exchange rate, CPI and import prices to the supply, the relative demand, the nominal and the foreign prices shocks. We show that the pass-through ratio in developing countries is different when considering different structural shocks.