New estimates of exchange rate pass-through in Japanese exports

Recently, the issue of a decline in exchange rate pass-through has gained much more attention. Taylor conjectures that a worldwide decline in exchange rate pass-through is related to the low and stable inflation in many industrialized countries since the early 1990s. Developments of 'new open-economy macroeconomics' also cast renewed attention on exchange rate pass-through. Theoretical research shows that the choice of an optimal exchange rate regime and the transmission of monetary policy impacts depend crucially on the exporter's price setting behaviour. There are many studies on the pass-through of Japanese exports, yet most studies simply use the industry-breakdown data on export price indices, which is insufficient to assess pass-through patterns in regional trade. Significantly, highly disaggregated (HS 9-digit level) commodity data are used here to evaluate the extent of pass-through by commodity and by destination. We investigate and compare the extent of pass-through to East Asia, Europe, and the US. We also examine whether there is any difference in the degree of pass-through in the pre- and post-Asian crisis era. Results suggest the most pricing-to-market (PTM) occurs in exports to the US market followed by significant, but less PTM in Europe. Virtually no PTM is found in Japanese exports to East Asia. Also, there is no clear evidence of either increasing or decreasing pass-through over time. Copyright (C) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.