The Asymmetric Effects of Exchange Rate Changes on Output: Evidence from Asian Countries

This article examines the asymmetric effects of real exchange rate changes on the domestic output of selected Asian countries. To account for asymmetries, we separate currency appreciation from depreciation and utilize the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model. Employing annual data (1973 to 2018), we find evidence of short-run and long-run asymmetries in the effects of real exchange changes on the domestic output of all the countries. This means that currency appreciations have different effects from currency depreciations on the output of the countries. Overall, the results suggest that both currency appreciations and depreciations are contractionary in most cases.