exchange rate pass through in u s manufacturing industries this paper studies exchange rate pass through in u s manufacturing industries and its cross sectional variation through an adapted dixit stiglitz model of product differentiation the paper predicts that pass through is positively related to the degree of product differentiation and inversely related to the elasticity of marginal cost with respect to output empirical estimates of the pass through elasticities show that pass through is incomplete and varies across industries the degree of pass through is found to be positively correlated to different proxies for product differentiation and negatively to a proxy for the elasticity of marginal cost

state dependent pricing invoicing currency and exchange rate pass through abstract we analyze exchange rate pass through and volatility of import prices in a dynamic framework where firms are subject to menu costs and decide on price adjustments in response to exchange rate innovations the exchange rate pass through and import price volatility then depend on the invoicing currency in combination with functional forms of cost and demand functions in particular there is lower pass through less frequent price adjustments and lower price volatility when prices are set in the importer s currency than when prices are set in the exporter s currency

currency substitution policy rule and pass through evidence from turkey in this article we analyse empirically currency substitution and exchange rate pass through in the turkish economy where their ongoing presence could undermine the implementation of a successful monetary policy especially in a flexible exchange rate regime even though a considerable time has passed after the implementation of a flexible exchange rate regime in turkey by using vector error correction model for the period from 1987 to 2004 we find that the currency substitution and exchange rate pass through still have importance in the turkish economy and the monetary policy stance has been considerably strong possibly as a response of ongoing presence of them if this is the case to avoid the undesired consequences of this strong monetary policy turkey should consider some policy measures to reduce the degree of pass through and currency substitution

exchange rates and cash flows in differentiated product industries a simulation approach how do exchange rate changes impact firms cash flows we extend a simulation method developed in industrial organization to answer this question we use prices quantities and product characteristics for differentiated products coupled with a discrete choice framework and an assumption of price competition to estimate marginal costs for all producers using a monte carlo approach we generate counterfactual prices and profits for different levels of exchange rates we illustrate the method using the market for bottled water our results stress that even in a relatively simple market such as this one different brands face very different exchange rate risks consider a firm that produces a good in france using mainly local inputs and sells it abroad in locations that have a floating exchange rate vis a vis the euro profits and in turn the value of the firm are potentially exposed to exchange rate changes if the euro appreciates profits when measured in euros are likely to decrease how large is the decrease in profits similarly what is the impact of such an exchange rate change on the profits of an import competing firm these are the questions that a large literature on exchange rate exposure attempts to answer

on measuring child costs with applications to poor countries the theoretical basis for measuring child costs is discussed and detailed consideration is given to two straightforward procedures for calculation engel s food share method and rothbarth s adult good method each of these methods embodies different definitions of child costs so that the same empirical evidence can generate quite different estimates depending on the method used it is shown that true costs are generally overstated by engel s method and understated by rothbarth s procedure although the latter unlike the former can provide a sensible starting point for cost measurement our estimates from sri lankan and indonesian data suggest that children cost their parents about 30 40 percent of what they spend on themselves

the effects of exchange rate volatility on commodity trade between the united states and mexico author affiliation mohsen bahmani oskooee department of economics p o box 413 bolton hall 822 university of wisconsin milwaukee milwaukee wi 53201 usa bahmani uwm edu corresponding authorscott w hegerty department of economics p o box 413 university of wisconsin milwaukee milwaukee wi 53201 usa hegertys beloit edu acknowledgment we would like to thank our anonymous referees for their valuable comments any error however is ours 1 introductionwith the breakdown of the bretton woods system in 1973 real exchange rates began to fluctuate greatly as volatility increased exporters and importers could no longer be as certain of the real prices of their goods this increased risk would affect their expected profits and thus influence their decision to trade exchange rate uncertainty has been shown to have affected trade flows between countries and across sectors but it has had both positive and negative effects in different studies increased volatility has had important implications in assessing the costs and benefits of various exchange rate regimes as well as of exchange rate controls in this study we assess the effect of this volatility on trade between the united states and mexico based on the exports and imports of 102 industries from 1962 to 2004 and we find that it plays a role only for a small number of individual industries 1intuitively one might surmise that uncertainty toward the real price of traded goods may reduce trade flows as risk averse buyers and sellers face possible losses due to exchange rate fluctuations and thus choose not to partake in risky dealings on the other hand it has been hypothesized that exchange rate risk can actually increase trade flows as importers and exporters opt to increase the volume of trade to attain a certain income making up for a decrease in the per unit value of a good by increasing the number of units bought or sold the bulk of the literature points to the former conclusion as reviewed by mckenzie 1999 and more recently by bahmani oskooee and hegerty 2007 the trading relationship between mexico and the united states is an important one more than 70 of mexico s exports go to the united states likewise mexico is still the second largest market for u s exports after canada mexico has taken advantage of its relatively inexpensive labor to attract u s manufacturing firms and expand its exports mexico imports automobile parts from the united states for example and then exports completed automobiles assembly line factories known as maquiladoras have attracted much attention but with the growth of china and competition from its even less expensive labor this sector has actually declined in addition the united states is mexico s main trading partner for agricultural products thus the two countries share important trade flows across a wide variety of sectors table 1 shows a breakdown of mexico s top 15 export and import industries in order of largest to smallest dollar value or trade share of the 102 industries that we analyze in our study the rankings are given for the year 1980 in order to capture the preliberalization trade structure and for the year 2004 to capture flows in the years after mexico joined the general agreement on tarifs and trade gatt and the north american free trade agreement nafta 2table 1 top 15 industries by dollar value of trade table omitted see article image the most striking observation in table 1 is that the same manufacturing industries occupy top spots for both exports and imports road motor vehicles exports of which have grown in importance since 1980 were also the top mexican import in both 1980 and 2004 likewise such manufacturing industry categories as telecommunications apparatus other electrical machinery machinery and appliances non electrical and office machines make up a large part of both export and import flows

symmetric pass through of tariffs and exchange rates under imperfect competition an empirical test abstract this paper examines the effect of tariffs and exchange rates on u s prices of japanese cars trucks and motorcycles in particular we test whether the long run pass through of tariffs and exchange rates are identical the symmetry hypothesis we find that this hypothesis is easily accepted in our sample we also find that the pass through relation varies across products ranging from about 0 6 for trucks to unity for motorcycles these coefficients have very different implications for trade policy we explain the results based on demand cost and institutional conditions in each industry

testing hypotheses about firm behavior in the cigarette industry data on the effects of excise taxes are used to investigate the level of competition in the cigarette industry a lower bound on the numbers equivalent of firms in the context of the conjectural variations model is derived and estimated results point to at least a moderately high level of competition and in particular allow for the rejection of the perfect cartel model this paper relies on comparative statics results and hence circumvents recent criticisms of a study of monopoly behavior in the cigarette industry

measurement of monopoly behavior an application to the cigarette industry a simple scheme is proposed to measure monopoly pricing behavior the coefficient of the tax rate term in a price equation identifies the ratio of price to marginal cost no direct measurement of costs is required so a major problem for other empirical studies of monopoly is avoided empirical results for cross section time series data support rejection of atomistic competition but also provide evidence against the operation of an effective cartel in the cigarette industry the model represents an alternative interpretation of related results in a recent paper by barzel application of the methodology to other markets is feasible

poverty and household size the widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy the scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view we find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0 6 this turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales by contrast some measures of child nutritional status indicate an elasticity of unity consideration of the weight attached to child versus adult welfare may help resolve the non robustness of demographic profiles of poverty excerpt

measuring chronic poverty without a panel abstract a new method of decomposing cross sectional poverty estimates into chronic and transient components is demonstrated using data from a recent household survey in papua new guinea this method is simpler than previously used panel methods because it does not require data on every household in every period the only requirement is that a subset of the surveyed households have a repeat observation made on their welfare indicator some time after the initial observation in the setting considered the chronic and transient components of headcount poverty are roughly equal while three quarters of the mean poverty gap is transient in the sense of being due to within year fluctuations in expenditures

terms of trade uncertainty savings and the production structure abstract this paper studies the response of savings and the production structure tradeables non tradeables to an increase in future terms of trade uncertainty holding expected utility constant there is no international trade in risky assets the impact on the production structure is studied by analyzing the markets for domestic equity the paper shows that the response of both non tradeables production and savings is ambiguous cross country evidence indicates that an increase in terms of trade uncertainty leads to a higher fraction of the labor force in the non tradeables sector

exchange rate pass through in turkish export and import prices this article examines exchange rate pass through into prices of internationally traded goods in the case of a small emerging open market economy such as turkey in this study we provide empirical evidence on complete pass through in export prices in turkey using aggregate data on the manufacturing sector our data do not however support complete pass through in import prices in turkey this contradicts with the findings of the existent literature which typically concludes that the degree of pass through in import prices is higher than the one of export prices this can be interpreted as a result of competition between import and import substituting industries where importers fall short of competing successfully with import substituting sectors although turkish importers can be responsive to exchange rate changes to a certain degree in the short run in the long run they seem to lose their market power perhaps as a result of swift competition a complete exchange rate pass through to export prices in t

high exchange rate volatility and low pass through abstract two specifications of an open economy model are shown to generate high exchange rate volatility and low exchange rate pass through erpt in the model price discrimination causes erpt to be incomplete in both the short and the long run in the short run a small amount of nominal rigidities is enough to reduce erpt sharply still exchange rate depreciation worsens the terms of trade consistent with the evidence possible biases from omitted variables and measurement error in the erpt empirical literature due to data limitations are investigated using model generated time series estimates of erpt coefficients can be quite different from true parameters and are sensitive to the shocks driving the economies estimates can nonetheless detect key structural features of the models

assessing the extent and nature of chronic poverty in low income countries issues and evidence discussions of chronic poverty have mostly considered its monetary dimensions with current evidence suggesting that such poverty is much more transient than chronic but chronic poverty is a real and important phenomenon potentially more important quantitatively than it first appears once account is taken of different methodological approaches and inevitable measurement difficulties the chronic poor have distinctive characteristics such as lack of assets or high dependency rates which may account for their persistent poverty the paper argues that it is also necessary to develop concepts of chronic poverty further covering relevant nonmonetary dimensions and not just relying on panel data

exchange rate pass through evidence from aggregate japanese exports the pass through of exchange rate changes to prices has been the subject of both theoretical and empirical investigations much of the recent interest in pass through was stimulated by the unprecedented movements in the u s dollar during the 1980s and by the potential for these movements to have lasting consequences on the domestic economy still unresolved in these studies is whether pass through to the u s market has declined over the past decade and if so why possible explanations include e g a growing dependence on imports changes in the structure of competition in the u s market or even unfair practices by foreign firms this issue is crucial to evaluating the long term effects of recent movements in u s dollar exchange rates this paper seeks to shed light on these issues indirectly by focusing on the stability of pass through in aggregate japanese exports japan is an obvious case study both because of its increasing presence in world trade and because of the continuing concern expressed frequently in the popular press over the large and persistent bilateral trade imbalances between japan and her major trading partners especially the u s two general criticisms of empirical studies in this area are the poor quality of the data analyzed and the lack of formal justification for the empirical modeling strategies employed these problems are addressed in this study in two ways first the data set used represents a significant improvement over those employed in other aggregate analyses this data from the bank of japan is unique because it is available on a monthly basis and because export prices as opposed to unit values are reported in both domestic and contractual currencies thus the exchange rate measure this study uses corresponds exactly to the export bundle that is we do not use the trade weighted exchange rate index commonly employed in addition to aggregate export price data this data set also contains six sector specific price indexes which permits a comparison of aggregate results with those at the sector or industry level second the problem of dynamic specification is addressed by estimating each equation in error correction form this methodology has been advocated as a means of avoiding illusory

international capital movements under uncertainty in this paper we analyze the determinants of international movements of physical capital in a model with uncertainty and international trade in goods and securities in our model the world allocation of capital is governed to some extent by the asset preferences of risk averse consumer investors in a one good variant in the spirit of the macdougall model we find that relative factor abundance relative labor force size and relative production riskiness have separate but interrelated influences on the direction of equilibrium capital movements these same factors remain important in a two good version with heckscher ohlin production structure in this case the direction of physical capital flow is determinate unlike in a world of certainty and may hinge on the identity of the factor that is used intensively in the industry with random technology

income smoothing and consumption smoothing one way that risk averse households protect consumption levels is to borrow and use insurance mechanisms another way common in low income economies is to diversify economic activities and make conservative production and employment choices households thus tend toward limiting exposure only to shocks that can be handled with available credit and insurance typically both types of mechanisms are studied independently but much more can be learned by studying them together first we obtain a more complete picture of risks costs and insurance possibilities second it opens the way to considering biases in standard tests of credit and insurance

using repeated cross sections to explore movements into and out of poverty movements in and out of poverty are of core interest to both policymakers and economists yet the panel data needed to analyze such movements are rare in this paper the authors build on the methodology used to construct poverty maps to show how repeated cross sections of household survey data can allow inferences to be made about movements in and out of poverty they illustrate that the method permits the estimation of bounds on mobility and provide non parametric and parametric approaches to obtaining these bounds they test how well the method works on data sets for vietnam and indonesia where we are able to compare our method to true panel estimates the results are sufficiently encouraging to offer the prospect of some limited basic insights into mobility and poverty duration in settings where historically it was judged that the data necessary for such analysis were unavailable

markup adjustment and exchange rate fluctuations evidence from panel data on automobile exports abstract this paper uses data on bilateral automobile export prices from the usa germany and japan to gauge the importance of markup adjustment driven by exchange rate movements across several destination markets we find that japanese exports are characterized by a high degree of markup adjustment designed to stabilize the price measured in the buyer s currency there is weak evidence for such behavior on the part of german exporters and no evidence of markup adjustment by us exporters where it exists markup adjustment tends to be highly persistent the dynamic pattern of markup adjustment is consistent with invoicing in the exporter s currency except for exports to the usa and canada

the heckscher ohlin and travis vanek theorems under uncertainty abstract the heckscher ohlin theorem is valid under uncertainty of the special benchmark sort modelled by helpman razin their pessimism over its validity is vanquished by more structure rational expectations are imposed on consumers and identical and constant relative aversion to income risk is assumed under these circumstances with free commodity trade the heckscher ohlin theorem holds for the international exchange of equities

data for measuring poverty and inequality changes in the developing countries abstract how does income distribution change with economic growth i distinguish between two aspects of income distribution poverty and inequality and discuss how to measure each i then review what data we would want and what data we have on changes in poverty and inequality in different countries i conclude with suggestions on how to overcome some of the current data deficiencies

microeconomic implications of exchange rate variations this paper investigates the effect of exchange rate variations on the equilibrium of an industry in which domestic firms are competing with foreign suppliers the paper is designed as an expository survey it discusses the perfectly competitive industry exchange rate pass through under imperfect competition entry exit and hysteresis with fixed costs and exchange rate uncertainty copyright 1990 by oxford university press

exchange rates and import prices for a small open economy the case of ireland as a further contribution to the growing international literature on exchange rate pass through pt this study assesses the extent of pt for irish import prices over the period 1963 to 1995 it fills two important gaps in the literature by making due allowance for the time series properties of the data and by concentrating on the case of a small open economy in order to assess the extent of pt a mark up model for aggregate import unit values is employed it is argued that the usual single equation mark up estimation technique leads to seriously biased and inefficient estimates of the degree of pt as it ignores the strong simultaneity of import prices and domestic competing prices this study makes use of the johansen technique to allow for such simultaneity and uncovers two long run equilibrium relationships among the data for import unit values and domestic competing prices and confirms the existence of very close to full pt for both previous results in the literature demonstrating substantially

exchange rate pass through in a small open economy the anglo irish case bilateral import unit values are constructed to investigate the extent and speed of exchange rate and production cost pass through into the unit values of irish imports total and sectoral from the uk using menon s 1996 mark up model the approach used to measure exchange rate pass through is based on cointegration and error correction modelling and the period of analysis is from 1979 to 1995 full pass through from the bilateral irish pound sterling exchange rate and from uk producer costs could not be rejected for total and sectoral import unit values for the sample period 1979q1 1995q4 this implies no role for domestic competing prices in explaining the long run relationship determining unit values of irish imports from the uk the results indicate that for aggregate and sectoral unit values of irish imports from the uk pass through is incomplete in the short run

calculating the real return on a sovereign wealth fund we present a new methodology for calculating the real return on sovereign wealth funds swf that share the investment objective of maximizing international purchasing power in terms of goods and services specifically we modify the traditional approach for deflating the nominal return along three dimensions the aggregator formula the measure of international prices and the weighting scheme we argue that a geometric average of price levels is an appropriate aggregator formula for capturing the deflationary effects of imports increasingly originating from low cost countries and that import prices paid by the swf owner and weights reflecting the owner s import pattern are consistent with the investment objective our proposed approach using the norwegian government pension fund global as an illustration raises the estimated average annual real rate of return over the sample period of 1998 2012 from 3 1 to 4 9

expected poverty under risk induced welfare variability two of the most widely accepted stylised facts about agriculture in south asia sub saharan africa and elsewhere are that income is highly uncertain from one year to another and that deep and widespread poverty exists and yet there has been very little analysis of the joint problems of poverty and risk this paper offers a methodological approach to the issue of how risk affects poverty and applies it to household level data for dry areas of rural india the following questions are addressed under what conditions can one expect an increase in the riskiness of an income or consumption stream to increase poverty how should one measure the contribution of risk to poverty and what long term benefits in terms of reduced poverty can be expected from policies aimed at stabilising incomes of the poor such policies have been widely discussed in the indian subcontinent of late and their effect on rural

price discrimination and markups in export markets abstract imperfect competition in international markets is one of the key explanations for why prices of similar goods might differ among destination countries this paper develops an empirical model to examine the presence of price discrimination stemming from imperfect competition in the international market for a country s exports the model is used to examine the export behavior of taiwanese exporters of footwear the generalized supply relation allows identification of deviations from competitive pricing in each export market in addition the model provides insights into the extent of exchange rate pass through finally the model is modified in order to estimate the effect of the voluntary export restraint imposed in the u s on footwear imports from taiwan

the degree and determinants of exchange rate pass through market structure non tariff barriers and multinational corporations this study investigates the exchange rate pass through for australian imports of manufactures pass through elasticities are estimated for total manufactures and forty product categories by applying an econometric procedure which avoids the pitfalls in previous studies to a carefully assembled data set the determinants of pass through are analyzed by relating the pass through elasticities to variables representing foreign control nontariff barriers product characteristics and market structure the author finds that pass through is incomplete for most products with significant variation across products unlike previous studies he finds that most of the variation in pass through is explained by the presence of multinational corporations and nontariff barriers copyright 1996 by royal economic society

estimating the residual demand curve facing a single firm this paper presents an econometric technique for estimating the single firm residual demand curve that does not require the estimation of demand cross elasticities the technique is particularly suited for the estimation of firm market power in product differentiated industries where cross elasticities are notoriously difficult to measure one estimated parameter is directly related to a firm s markup of price over marginal cost when product differentiation is extensive when an industry consists of a dominant firm and a price taking fringe when a consistent conjectures equilibrium is the correct oligopoly solution concept when firms are stackelberg leaders relative to their environment or when firms are perfect competitors the estimates can indicate power over price in other circumstances an instrumental variables technique is employed using firm individuated factor prices to identify firm specific residual demand yet even when instruments are unavailable the technique produces elasticity estimates biased in the conservative direction of disproving market power this methodology is applied to estimate the market power of three firms in an industry characterized by product differentiation brewing over our 1962 82 sample period pabst and coors had similar national market shares and each had high shares in several states yet pabst was virtually a price taker while coors possessed substantial market power anheuser busch had market power in the early part of the sample but little after 1975 when miller brewing changed the competitive nature of the industry

product aggregation market integration and relationships between prices an application to world salmon markets relationships between prices of goods offer motives of interest in at least two areas market integration and product aggregation there is a close relationship between market integration and aggregation which may increase the usefulness of market integration studies in this article these relationships are developed and illustrated by an application to the world salmon market it is shown that the law of one price holds for an international market with five salmon species this result has significant implications for the world salmon market regarding both product aggregation in demand analyses and international trade policy

explaining the exchange rate pass through in different prices abstract this paper examines the performance of a variety of new open economy macroeconomic models in explaining the exchange rate pass through in a wide range of prices quantitative versions of different models are used to derive the dynamic response of various prices to an exchange rate shock predicted responses are compared with the evidence based on var models to examine how well different models fit the data the results show that the best fitting model incorporates a number of features highlighted by different strands of the literature sticky prices sticky wages distribution costs and a combination of local lcp and producer currency pricing pcp

a reexamination of the neoclassical trade model under uncertainty abstract this paper presents a model that pinpoints the exact places and reasons that the propositions of the heckscher ohlin samuelson model break down under uncertainty within the model if preferences exhibit decreasing absolute risk aversion i a capital poor country tends to obtain lower revenues from its resources than the same resources would yield in capital rich countries ii if there is one riskless and one risky sector a capital abundant country tends to have a comparative advantage in the risky sector and iii the pattern of trade depends on the intra national as well as the inter national distribution of endowments

are devaluations contractionary in mena countries currency depreciation reduces aggregate supply by raising cost of imported inputs and increases aggregate demand by increasing its net export component depending on the relative strength of the two effects depreciation could be expansionary or contractionary we employ the bounds testing approach to cointegration and error correction modelling to evaluate the effects of exchange rate depreciation on output growth both in the short and in the long run across a sample of mena countries exchange rate fluctuations are found to be important to fluctuations in real output growth in the short run anticipated exchange rate depreciation may induce long run expansionary or contractionary effects on output supply consistent with theory s predictions the expansionary effect of unanticipated depreciation is only transitory on output growth nonetheless unanticipated depreciation is found to have a contractionary effect on output growth in the long run via an increase in the cost of imported inputs

issues in measuring and modeling poverty economists have relied heavily on household incomes or expenditures normalized for differences in household specific prices and demographics in their research and policy advice related to poverty and inequality recognizing the conceptual and empirical problems that confound such measures does not mean that they should be ignored instead it indicates the need for supplementary measures to capture the missing items implementing a genuinely multidimensional approach will often make the welfare rankings of social states more difficult but that fact points to the nonrobustness of low dimensional rankings this may have its own policy ramifications with the possibility of correspondence between policy instruments and welfare objectives the model types used to understand the poverty and inequity determination processes will be affected not only will there be more dependent variables to consider but variables will have potentially complex relationships these relationships will often be hard to empirically disentangle despite richer integrated and longitudinal data sets such data open rich and relevant agenda for research into the dynamics of poverty along multiple dimensions a simultaneous attack on these issues from all three fronts measurement modeling and data offers hope of establishing a credible empirical foundation for public action in fighting poverty

goods prices and exchange rates what have we learned import prices typically change by a smaller proportion than the exchange rate between the exporting and importing country recent research indicates that common currency relative prices for similar goods exported to different markets are highly correlated with exchange rates between those markets this evidence suggests that incomplete pass through is a consequence of third degree price discrimination while distance matters for market segmentation borders have independent effects the source of the border effect has not been clearly identified furthermore there is little evidence yet to suggest substantial market power is implied by the observed price discrimination

exchange rate pass through abstract the resilience of trade balances of the major industrialized economies to changes in their exchange rates has evoked interest in the exchange rate pass through relationship so far there has not been a comprehensive survey of this literature the paper aims to fill this gap in two ways first it pieces together the theoretical literature on exchange rate pass through second it provides a critical survey of the empirical literature on exchange rate pass through emphasis is placed on the data and methodology employed in previous work this is done in order to guide future work in this growing area of research

incomplete pass through and the welfare effects of exchange rate variability abstract this paper considers the implications of incomplete exchange rate pass through for optimal monetary and exchange rate policy a two country model is presented which allows an explicit derivation of welfare functions in terms of a weighted sum of the second moments of producer prices and the nominal exchange rate from a single country perspective the optimal exchange rate variance depends on the degree of pass through the size and openness of the economy the elasticity of labour supply and the volatility of foreign producer prices welfare may be decreasing or increasing in the volatility of the exchange rate

trade patterns under uncertainty with country specific shocks the helpman razin model of international trade under uncertainty is extended to allow for country specific productivi ty shocks it is shown that for the multiple sector multiple factor case there exists a set of interesting sufficient conditions under w hich it is possible to predict the pattern of international trade in securities goods and factor content on the basis of cross country d ifferences in factor endowments it is shown that under these circum stances some well known empirical tests have to be modified copyright 1988 by the econometric society

pricing to market behaviour and exchange rate pass through in japanese exports this paper examines the relationship between exchange rate changes and japanese export pricing behavior employing a methodology which permits the separate measurement of pricing to market behavior and the cost impact of exchange rate changes the results suggest that incomplete pass through of exchange rate changes is a pervasive phenomenon but rejects the widely held view that japanese export firms have relied more heavily on pricing to market strategies during the period of yen appreciation in order to maintain market shares there is also evidence that estimates which capture only pricing to market behavior may over emphasise the degree of pass through to the extent that cost of production is sensitive to exchange rate changes copyright 1994 by royal economic society

structural adjustment policies income distribution and poverty a review of the jamaican experience abstract although jamaica has had structural adjustment and standby loans from the world bank and the international monetary fund imf since 1977 the implementation of typical structural adjustment policies such as trade and financial liberalization privatization and labor market reform has for the most part occurred only since 1989 during 1989 1993 when the jamaican economy underwent the most drastic liberalization policies inequality and poverty declined although there were sharp jumps in both inequality and poverty in 1991 when financial liberalization occurred the overall decline in poverty is attributed to the strong performance of domestic agriculture and the increased inflow of remittances and seems unlikely to be sustained

chronic and transient poverty in rural china abstract this paper rectifies the poverty decomposition framework of rodgers and rodgers 1993 which violates the focus axiom of sen 1976 an empirical application of the rectified technique reveals that poverty in rural china was dominated by the chronic component

risk sharing and industrial specialization regional and international evidence the authors provide empirical evidence that risk sharing enhances specialization in production to the best of their knowledge this well established and important theoretical proposition has not been tested before the empirical procedure is summarized as follows first the authors construct a measure of specialization in production and calculate an index of specialization for each of the european community ec and non ec oecd countries u s states canadian provinces japanese prefectures latin american countries and regions of italy spain and the united kingdom then they estimate the degree of capital market integration a measure of risk sharing within each of these groups of regions the ec countries the non ec oecd countries the united states canada japan italy spain and the united kingdom and rely on another author s estimate for latin america finally they perform a regression of the specialization index on the degree of risk sharing controlling for relevant economic variables they find a positive and significant relation between the degree of specialization of individual members of a group of countries provinces states or prefectures and the amount of risk that is shared within the group the authors perform regressions using variables such as shareholder rights and the size of the financial sector relative to gdp as instruments for the amount of inter regional risk sharing these regressions confirm that risk sharing facilitated by a favorable legal environment and a developed financial system is a direct causal determinant of industrial specialization this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

exchange rates and prices the adjustment of relative prices to exchange rate movements is explained in an industrial organization approach given labor costs in the respective currencies exchange rate movements change costs for firms selling in the home market and thus disturb the industry equilibrium the extent of absolute and relative price adjustment is shown to depend on market integration product substitutability the relative number of domestic and foreign firms and the market structure the impact of exchange rates on prices is illustrated in a variety of approaches including the cournot a dixit and j stiglitz 1977 and s salop 1979 models some empirical evidence is offered in support of the theory copyright 1987 by american economic association