Exchange Rates and Trade Flows in Asia

A bit more on shifting trade flows following the 1997 Asian Crisis.

Enno Schroeder, whose decomposition  of European trade flows I’ve mentioned here before, was kind enough to do a similar exercise for the four Asian crisis countries. His results are here; below I present them in graphical form below.

The conventional story, as we all know, is that relative prices drive trade flows. The Asian countries, in this view, moved from deficits to surpluses after 1997 because abandoning their currency pegs and devaluing made their exports cheaper and their imports more expensive. I’ve been suggesting a different story: Relative prices were relatively unimportant in the post-1997 move to surpluses, with the improved trade balance mostly or entirely a matter of lower imports resulting from the deep fall in income in the crisis. Looking at the picture in more detail suggests a more complex but in some ways even stronger version of my earlier story.

Some context: Suppose a country reduces its total import bill. As a matter of accounting, this reduction can be broken up into some mix of lower total quantity of goods bought, a smaller fraction of those goods being imports, and a lower price of the imported goods. Similarly for exports, any increase can be broken up into higher incomes in a country’s export markets, a greater market share there for our exports, and higher export prices. So the overall trade balance — here expressed as the ratio of total export value to total import value — can be decomposed into the change in relative expenditure growth, the expenditure switch between the home country’s goods and the rest of the world’s; and the change in the relative price of home goods compared with foreign ones. (Note that relative price presumably affects trade volumes, but it also affects trade value directly — for given trade volumes, if a country’s imports are more expensive it will spend more on imports.) The cumulative contribution of each of these components is shown in the figures below, along with the nominal exchange rate. (The exchange rate is the nominal rate for July of each year, from the BIS.)

The heavy black line is the actual trade balance. Again, since the balance here is expressed as the ratio of exports to imports, a value of 1 means balanced trade. The other three solid lines show the cumulative contributions of each component to the changes in trade flows after 1996; the values represent how the trade ratio would have changed from that factor alone. Yellow is expenditure switch, from the rest of the world’s goods to the home country’s; this includes both home country switch from imports to domestic goods, and foreign country shift toward the home country’s exports. Green is income growth in the country’s trade partners relative to the home country. The solid red line is the terms of trade. The dotted red line shows the cumulative change in the nominal exchange rate; this isn’t directly a contribution to the change in trade flows, but it’s useful to know how closely the change in the terms of trade tracks the exchange rate.

It’s convenient to think of the difference between the black line and the green line as the change in competitiveness.

The immediate effect of a devaluation is to make the home country’s goods cheaper in the rest of the world, and the rest of the world’s goods more expensive in the home country. The direct effect of this is to move the trade balance further toward deficit — a descending red line in the figures below. But in the conventional story, the change in price leads to a more than proportionate change in quantity — a rise in exports and/or a fall in imports — so that the overall trade balance improves. This should show up here as a rise in the yellow line steeper than the fall in the red one. Income growth doesn’t really come into the conventional story, so the green line should be flat.

This is not what we see. Even in terms of this simple decomposition, the post-crisis experience of each of the four Asian NICs was different, but none of them fit the standard story. Devaluations don’t reliably translate into changes in the terms of trade, and changes in the terms of trade don’t reliably translate into changes in trade flows. The income-trade balance link, on the other hand, looks quite reliable. In terms of the debate taking place elsewhere in econ blog land, this is a case where “hydraulic Keynesianism” looks pretty good.

Thailand is the clearest picture.

In the 1997 devaluation, the baht lost about a third of its value; the fall in the terms of trade — the price of Thai exports relative to imports — was less than proportionate, but still substantial. You can see this in the red lines at the bottom. But there was no expenditure switch at all. The flat yellow line shows that expenditure on foreign goods out of a given Thai income, and expenditure on Thai goods out of a given income elsewhere, did not change at all in the ten years after the crisis. (More precisely, expenditure in Thailand shifted toward domestic goods, while Thailand lost ground in its export markets; the two effects approximately canceled out.) Given that Thai goods were getting cheaper relative to foreign goods, the lack of net expenditure switch toward Thai goods should have led to deeper deficits. The only reason Thailand moved from deficit to surplus, is the decline in expenditure in Thailand relative to expenditure in its trading partners. The close match between the black and the green line in the figure, means that essentially the whole change in Thailand’s trade balance is explained by the change in relative growth rates; there was no net switch toward Thai goods from foreign goods.

Indonesia is in some ways even a starker example:

Here we see a very deep devaluation, but again only a moderate change in the terms of trade, and an even smaller response of trade volumes. As in Thailand, the trade balance basically tracks relative income growth. The difference between these two cases is where the devaluation-trade flows link fails. In Thailand, the devaluation did reduce the price of exports relative to imports, but demand was not price-elastic enough for the change in prices to improve the trade balance. (In other words, the Marshall-Lerner-Robinson condition appears not to have been satisfied.) In Indonesia, the even larger devaluation — the rupiah lost almost 80 percent of its value — failed to change relative prices of traded goods, so demand elasticities did not come into play. This is partly because of high inflation in Indonesia following the devaluation, but not entirely – the rupiah fell by nearly half in real terms. But there was no change in the price of Indonesia’s exports relative to its imports. If you want an example of a devaluation not working, this is a good one.

Korea, by contrast, looks superficially like the devaluation success story.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Korea was the only one of these countries where export growth in the decade after 1997 was as fast as in the decade before. And as the figure here shows, there was a substantial shift expenditure toward Korean goods following the crisis; alone among the four countries, Korea achieved its immediate post-crisis improvement in trade balance mainly through favorable expenditure switch rather than solely through a fall in income (though that contributed too.) But over time, Korea’s terms of trade continued to deteriorate, without any further favorable expenditure switch; meanwhile, Korean growth slowed relative to its trade partners. By 2007, expenditure shares were back at 1997 levels; to the extent that Korea’s trade balance was more favorable, it was only because spending was lower relative to its trade partners. Of course the surpluses it had run in the meantime had allowed the accumulation of substantial foreign exchange reserves. But if the goal is to use a lower exchange rate to achieve a permanent shift in trade balances, Korea post-1997 cannot be considered a success.

I should emphasize here: Slower relative expenditure growth in Korea does not mean slow growth in absolute terms. In fact, Korea (and, to varying degrees, the other three) did enjoy strong post-crisis recoveries. But because by far the largest trading partner for these countries is China — taking about 25% of their exports — even fairly strong growth translated into low relative growth. In other words, rapid growth in China implied growing exports in the NICs even in the absence of any competitiveness gains.

Finally, the one country that did achieve a lasting improvement in competitiveness, Malaysia.

In the immediate crisis period, Malaysia looks like Thailand and Indonesia: A deep devaluation fails to pass through to the relative prices of traded goods, and there is no expenditure switching; instead, the entire burden of raising the trade balance falls on slower growth in domestic expenditure. In the case of Malaysia, domestic expenditure fell by an astonishing 28 percent in 1997, a collapse in economic activity that has few precedents — neither the US in the 1930s nor any Euro-crisis country comes close. But in the case of Malaysia, unlike the other three countries, growth subsequently accelerated relative to its trade partners, reflected in the downward sloping green line; at the same time, there was a continued expenditure switch in favor of Malaysian goods, reflected in the upward slope of the yellow line. What’s especially striking about this competitiveness success story is that the favorable expenditure switch happened despite a rising price of of Malaysia’s exports relative to its imports.

To continue with this analysis properly, one would want to disaggregate imports and exports by sector or industry. And would want to study, for each country, the institutional and legal changes that influenced trade flows in the decade after 1997. But failing that, it’s at least worth understanding what the aggregate numbers are saying. It seems to me that they are saying this:

Even a very deep devaluation, as in Indonesia, is not guaranteed to change the relative prices of a country’s imports and exports.

Even if a devaluation is passed through to relative prices, as in Thailand, price elasticities may not be large enough to produce a favorable change in the trade balance.

Even if a devaluation moves relative prices, and demand is price-elastic enough for the price change to move the trade balance in the right direction, as in Korea, a short-term improvement in competitiveness may not persist.

When countries do achieve a long-term improvement in competitiveness, like Malaysia, they don’t necessarily do so through a relative cheapening of exports compared to imports. On the contrary: If the Marshall-Lerner condition is not satisfied, then a relative increase in the price of a country’s exports will raise export earnings. In the case of Malaysia, improved terms of trade (that is, a rise in the price of its exports relative to its imports) account for about half the long-run improvement in its trade balance.

The Asian precedent does not make a Greek (or Spanish, or Portuguese, or Irish) devaluation look like an obviously good idea.

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One other thing, if even real exchange rate changes are not passed through to traded-good prices in the destination country, then they must be showing up as changes in exporter profit margins. This shifts the focus from demand responses to supply responses, which I would argue are  more institutionally mediated. As you can tell if you’ve read this far, I am sympathetic to the “elasticity-pessimist” strand of Post Keynesian thought. But on the other side Robert Blecker has a strong argument for a strong effect of exchange rate changes, focusing on the role of export-industry profits in financing investment. Blecker’s paper, in my opinion, is more convincing the straightforward “prices matter” view of exchange rate changes. But it also suggests a certain asymmetry: low profits induce exit from tradable sectors, especially for countries with Anglo-American market-based financial systems, more reliably than high profits encourage entry.

UPDATE: The fact that even large exchange rate changes produce relatively small movements in the relative prices of traded goods is well-known in the empirical trade literature. See for example here. I should have made this clearer.

Demand and Competitiveness: Germany and the EU

I put up a post the other day about Enno Schroder’s excellent work on accounting for changes in trade flows. Based on the comments, there’s some confusion about the methodology. That’s not surprising: It’s not complicated, but it’s also not a familiar way of looking at this stuff, either within or outside the economics profession. Maybe a numerical example will help?

Let’s consider two trading partners, in this case Germany and the rest of the EU. (Among other things, having just two partners avoids the whole weighting issue.) The first line of the table below shows total demand in each — that is, all private consumption, government consumption, and investment — in billions of euros. (As usual, this is final demand — transfers and intermediate goods are excluded.) So, for instance, in the year 2000 all spending by households, firms and governments in Germany totaled 2.04 trillion euros. The next two lines show the part of that expenditure that went to imports — from the rest of the EU for Germany, from Germany for the rest of the EU, and from the rest of the world for both. The final two lines of each panel then show the share of total expenditure in each place that went to German and rest-of-EU goods respectively. The table looks at 2000 and 2009, a period of growing surpluses for Germany.

2000 2009
Germany Demand 2,041 2,258
Imports from EU 340 429
Imports from Rest of World 198 235
Germany Share 74% 71%
EU ex-Germany Share 17% 19%
EU ex-Germany Demand 9,179 11,633
Imports from Germany 387 501
Imports from Rest of World 795 998
Germany Share 4% 4%
EU ex-Germany Share 87% 87%
Ratio, Germany-EU Exports to Imports 1.14 1.17
EU Surplus, Percent of German GDP 2.27 3.02

So what do we see? In 2000, 74 cents out of every euro spent in Germany went for German goods and services, and 17 cents for goods and services from the rest of the EU. Nine years later, 71 cents out of each German euro went to German stuff, and 19 cents to stuff from the rest of the EU. German households, businesses and government agencies were buying more from the rest of Europe, and less from their own country. Meanwhile, the rest of Europe was spending 4 cents out of every euro on goods and services from Germany — exactly the same fraction in 2009 as in 2000.

If Germans were buying more from the rest of the EU, and non-German Europeans were buying the same amount from Germany, how could it be that the German trade surplus with the rest of Europe increased? And by nearly one percent of German GDP, a significant amount? The answer is that total expenditure was rising much faster in the rest of Europe — by 2.7 percent a year, compared with 1.1 percent a year in Germany. This is what it means to say that the growing German surplus is entirely accounted for by demand, and that Germany actually lost competitiveness over this period.

Again, these are not estimates, they are the actual numbers as reported by EuroStat. It is simply a matter of historical fact that Germans spent more of their income on goods from the rest of the EU, and less on German goods, in 2009 than in 2000, and that the rest of the EU spent the same fraction of its income on German goods in the two years. Obviously, this does not rule out the possibility that German goods were becoming cheaper relative to the rest of Europe’s, if you postulate some other factor that would have reduced Germany’s exports without a growing cost advantage. (This is not so easy, since Germany’s exports are the sort of high-end manufactures which usually have a high income elasticity, i.e. for which demand is expected to rise over time.) And it is also compatible with a story where German export prices fell, but export demand is price-inelastic, so that lower prices did nothing to raise export earnings. But it is absolutely not compatible with a simple story where the most important driver of German trade imbalances is changing relative prices. For that story to work, the main factor in Germany’s growing surpluses would have to have been expenditure switching from other countries’ goods to Germany’s. And that didn’t happen.

NOTE: This my table, not Enno’s. The data is from Eurostat, while he uses the Penn World Tables, and he does not look at intra-European trade specifically.

UPDATE: There’s another question, which no one asked but which you should always try to answer: Why does it matter? The truth is, a big reason I care about this is that I’m curious how capitalist economies work, and this stuff seems to shed some light on that, in terms of both the specific content  and the methodology. But more specifically:

First, seeing trade flows as driven by income as well as price fits better with a vision of economy that has many different possible states of rest. It fits better with a vision of economies evolving in historical time, rather than gravitating toward an equilibrium which is both natural and optimal. In this particular case, there is no reason to suppose that the relative growth rates consistent with full employment in each country are also the relative growth rates consistent with balanced trade. A world in which trade flows respond mainly to relative prices is a world where macropolicy doesn’t pose any fundamentally different challenges in an open economy than in a closed one. Whatever mechanisms operated to ensure full employment continue to do so, and then the exchange rate adjusts to keep trade flows balanced (or appropriately unbalanced, for a country with a good reason to export or import capital.) Whereas when the main relationship is between income and trade, they cannot vary independently.

Second, there are important implications for policy. Krugman keeps saying that Germany needs higher relative prices, i.e., higher inflation. Even leaving aside the political difficulties with such a program, it makes sense on its own terms only if there is a fixed pool of European demand. To say that the only way you can have an adequate level of demand in Greece is for prices to fall relative to Germany, is to accept, on a European or global level, the structural theory of unemployment that Krugman rejects so firmly (and rightly) for the US. By contrast if competitiveness didn’t cause the problem, we shouldn’t assume competitiveness is involved in the solution. The historical evidence suggests that more rapid income growth in Germany will be sufficient to move its current account back to balance. The implications for domestic demand in Germany are the opposite in this case as in the relative-prices case: Fixing the current account problem means more jobs and orders for German workers and firms, not  higher inflation in Germany. [1]

So if you buy this story, you should be more pessimistic about a Greek exit from the euro — since there’s less reason to think that flexible exchange rates will lead to balanced trade — but more optimistic about a solution within the euro.

I don’t understand why, for economists like Krugman and Dean Baker, Keynesianism always seems to stop at the water’s edge. Why does their analysis of international trade always implicitly [2] assume a world economy continually at full capacity, where a demand shortfall in one country or region implies excess demand somewhere else? They know perfectly well that the question of unemployment in one country cannot be reduced to the question of who is getting paid too much; why do they forget it as soon as exchange rates come into the picture? Perhaps it’s for the same reasons — whatever they are — that so many economists who support all kinds of domestic regulation are ardent supporters of free trade, even though that’s just laissez-faire at the global level. In the particular case of Krugman, I think part of the problem is that his own scholarly work is in trade. So when the conversation turns to trade he loses one of the biggest assets he brings to discussions of domestic policy — a willingness to forget all the “progress” in economic theory over the past 30 or 40 years.

[1] A more reasonable version of the higher-prices-in-Germany claim is that Germany must be willing to accept higher inflation in order to raise demand. In some times and places this could certainly be true. But I don’t think it is for Germany, given the evident slack in labor markets implied by stagnant wages. And in any case that’s not what Krugman is saying — for him, higher inflation is the solution, not an unfortunate side effect.

[2] Or sometimes explicitly — e.g. this post has Germany sitting on a vertical aggregate supply curve.