National Income Accounting and the Balance of Payments 351

CHAPTER 13

National Income Accounting PART THREE and the Balance of Payments

etween 2004 and 2007, the world economy boomed, its total real product B growing at an annual average rate of about 5 percent per year. The growth rate of world production slowed to around 3 percent per year in 2008, before Exchange Rates and Open-Economy Macroeconomics dropping to minus 0.6 percent in 2009—a reduction in world output unprec edented in the period since World War II. In many countries, including the United States, unemployment soared. The world’s developing and emerging countries quickly returned to an annual growth rate close to 6 percent per year, but have since slowed down, growing at a rate close to 4 percent per year during 2016. The European countries that use the euro again grew at a negative rate in 2012 and have recovered at an anemic pace ever since. Can economic analysis help us to understand the behavior of the global economy and the reasons why individual countries’ fortunes often differ? Previous chapters have been concerned primarily with the problem of making the best use of the world’s scarce productive resources at a single point in time. The branch of economics called microeconomics studies this problem from the perspective of individual firms and consumers. Microeconomics works “from the bottom up” to show how individual economic actors, by pursuing their own inter ests, collectively determine how resources are used. In our study of international microeconomics, we have learned how individual production and consumption decisions produce patterns of international trade and specialization. We have also seen that while free trade usually encourages efficient resource use, government intervention or market failures can cause waste even when all factors of produc tion are fully employed. With this chapter, we shift our focus and ask: How can economic policy ensure that factors of production are fully employed? And what determines how an econ omy’s capacity to produce goods and services changes over time? To answer these questions, we must understand macroeconomics, the branch of econom ics that studies how economies’ overall levels of employment, production, and growth are determined. Like microeconomics, macroeconomics is concerned with the effective use of scarce resources. But while microeconomics focuses on

349

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the economic decisions of individuals, macroeconomics analyzes the behavior of an economy as a whole. In our study of international macroeconomics, we will learn how the interactions of national economies influence the worldwide pattern of macroeconomic activity. Macroeconomic analysis emphasizes four aspects of economic life that, until now, we have usually kept in the background to simplify our discussion of inter national economics:

1. Unemployment. We know that in the real world, workers may be unemployed and factories may be idle. Macroeconomics studies the factors that cause unemployment and the steps governments can take to prevent it. A main con cern of international macroeconomics is the problem of ensuring full employ ment in economies open to international trade. 2. Saving. In earlier chapters, we usually assumed that every country consumes an amount exactly equal to its income—no more and no less. In reality, though, households can put aside part of their income to provide for the future, or they can borrow temporarily to spend more than they earn. A country’s saving or borrow ing behavior affects domestic employment and future levels of national wealth. From the standpoint of the international economy as a whole, the world saving rate determines how quickly the world stock of productive capital can grow. 3. Trade imbalances. As we saw in earlier chapters, the value of a country’s imports equals the value of its exports when spending equals income. This state of balanced trade is seldom attained by actual economies, however. In the following chapters, trade imbalances play a large role because they redis tribute wealth among countries and are a main channel through which one country’s macroeconomic policies affect its trading partners. It should be no surprise, therefore, that trade imbalances, particularly when they are large and persistent, quickly can become a source of international discord. 4. Money and the price level. The trade theory you have studied so far is a barter theory, one in which goods are exchanged directly for other goods on the basis of their relative prices. In practice, it is more convenient to use money—a widely acceptable medium of exchange—in transactions, and to quote prices in terms of money. Because money changes hands in virtually every transaction that takes place in a modern economy, fluctuations in the supply of money or in the demand for it can affect both output and employment. International macroeconomics takes into account that every country uses a currency and that a monetary change (for example, a change in money supply) in one coun try can have effects that spill across its borders to other countries. Stability in money price levels is an important goal of international macroeconomic policy. This chapter takes the first step in our study of international macroeconomics by explaining the accounting concepts economists use to describe a country’s level of production and its international transactions. To get a complete picture of the macro economic linkages among economies that engage in international trade, we have

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to master two related and essential tools. The first of these tools, national income accounting, records all the expenditures that contribute to a country’s income and output. The second tool, balance of payments accounting, helps us keep track of both changes in a country’s indebtedness to foreigners and the fortunes of its export- and import-competing industries. The balance of payments accounts also show the connection between foreign transactions and national money supplies.

LEARNING GOALS

After reading this chapter, you will be able to: ■■ Discuss the concept of the current account balance. ■■ Use the current account balance to extend national income accounting to open economies. ■■ Apply national income accounting to the interaction of saving, investment, and net exports. ■■ Describe the balance of payments accounts and explain their relationship to the current account balance. ■■ Relate the current account to changes in a country’s net foreign wealth.

The National Income Accounts Of central concern to macroeconomic analysis is a country’s gross national product (GNP), the value of all final goods and services produced by the country’s factors of production and sold on the market in a given time period. GNP, which is the basic measure of a country’s output studied by macroeconomists, is calculated by adding up the market value of all expenditures on final output. GNP therefore includes the value of goods like bread sold in a supermarket and textbooks sold in a bookstore as well as the value of services provided by stockbrokers and plumbers. Because output cannot be produced without the aid of factor inputs, the expenditures that make up GNP are closely linked to the employment of labor, capital, and other factors of production. To distinguish among the different types of expenditure that make up a country’s GNP, government economists and statisticians who compile national income accounts divide GNP among the four possible uses for which a country’s final output is purchased: consumption (the amount consumed by private domestic residents), investment (the amount put aside by private firms to build new plant and equipment for future production), government purchases (the amount used by the government), and the current account balance (the amount of net exports of goods and services to foreigners). The term national income accounts, rather than national output accounts, is used to describe this fourfold classifica- tion because a country’s income in fact equals its output. Thus, the national income accounts can be thought of as classifying each transaction that contributes to national income according to the type of expenditure that gives rise to it. Figure 13-1 shows how U.S. GNP was divided among its four components in the first quarter of 2016.1

1In Figure 13-1, quarterly GNP and its components are measured at an annual rate (that is, they are multiplied by four). Our definition of the current account is not strictly accurate when a country is a net donor or recipient of foreign gifts. This possibility, along with some others, also complicates our identification of GNP with national income. We describe later in this chapter how the definitions of national income and the current account must be changed in such cases.

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Billions Pearson MyLab of dollars GNP Economics Real-time data 19,000 FIGURE 13-1 U.S. GNP and Its Components 16,000 America’s gross national product Consumption for the first quarter of 2016 can 13,000 be broken down into the four components shown. 10,000

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis. The figure 7,000 shows 2016:QI GNP and its components Government at an annual rate, seasonally adjusted. 4,000 Investment purchases

1,000

–2,000 Current account

Why is it useful to divide GNP into consumption, investment, government purchases, and the current account? One major reason is that we cannot hope to understand the cause of a particular recession or boom without knowing how the main categories of spending have changed. And without such an understanding, we cannot recommend a sound policy response. In addition, the national income accounts provide information essential for studying why some countries are rich—that is, have a high level of GNP relative to population size—while some are poor.

National Product and National Income Our first task in understanding how economists analyze GNP is to explain in greater detail why the GNP a country generates over some time period must equal its national income, the income earned in that period by its factors of production. The reason for this equality is that every dollar used to purchase goods or services automatically ends up in somebody’s pocket. A visit to the doctor provides a simple example of how an increase in national output raises national income by the same amount. The $75 you pay the doctor represents the market value of the services he or she provides for you, so your visit raises GNP by $75. But the $75 you pay the doctor also raises his or her income. So national income rises by $75. The principle that output and income are the same also applies to goods, even goods produced with the help of many factors of production. Consider the example of an economics textbook. When you purchase a new book from the publisher, the value of your purchase enters GNP. But your payment enters the income of the productive factors that cooperated in producing the book because the publisher must pay for their services with the proceeds of sales. First, there are the authors, editors, artists, and compositors who provide the labor inputs necessary for the book’s production. Second, there are the publishing company’s shareholders, who receive dividends for having financed acquisition of the capital used in production. Finally, there are the suppliers of paper and ink, who provide the intermediate materials used in producing the book.

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The paper and ink purchased by the publishing house to produce the book are not counted separately in GNP because their contribution to the value of national output is already included in the book’s price. It is to avoid such double counting that we allow only the sale of final goods and services to enter into the definition of GNP. Sales of intermediate goods, such as paper and ink purchased by a publisher, are not counted. Notice also that the sale of a used textbook does not enter GNP. Our definition counts only final goods and services that are produced, and a used textbook does not qualify: It was counted in GNP at the time it was first sold. Equivalently, the sale of a used textbook does not generate income for any factor of production.

Capital Depreciation and International Transfers Because we have defined GNP and national income so that they are necessarily equal, their equality is really an identity. Two adjustments to the definition of GNP must be made, however, before the identification of GNP and national income is entirely correct in practice. 1. GNP does not take into account the economic loss due to the tendency of machinery and structures to wear out as they are used. This loss, called depreciation, reduces the income of capital owners. To calculate national income over a given period, we must therefore subtract from GNP the depreciation of capital over the period. GNP less depreciation is called net national product (NNP). 2. A country’s income may include gifts from residents of foreign countries, called unilateral transfers. Examples of unilateral transfers of income are pension payments to retired citizens living abroad, reparation payments, and foreign aid such as relief funds donated to drought-stricken nations. For the United States in 2015, the balance of such payments amounted to around - +145 billion, representing a 0.8 percent of GNP net transfer to foreigners. Net unilateral transfers are part of a country’s income but are not part of its product, and they must be added to NNP in calculations of national income. National income equals GNP less depreciation plus net unilateral transfers. The difference between GNP and national income is by no means an insignificant amount, but macroeconomics has little to say about it, and it is of little importance for macroeconomic analysis. Therefore, for the purposes of this text, we usually use the terms GNP and national income interchangeably, emphasizing the distinction between the two only when it is essential.2

Gross Domestic Product Most countries other than the United States have long reported gross domestic product (GDP) rather than GNP as their primary measure of national economic activity. In 1991, the United States began to follow this practice as well. GDP is supposed to measure the volume of production within a country’s borders, whereas GNP equals GDP plus net receipts of factor income from the rest of the world. For the United States,

2Strictly speaking, government statisticians refer to what we have called “national income” as national disposable income. Their official concept of national income omits foreign net unilateral transfers. Once again, however, the difference between national income and national disposable income is usually unimportant for macroeconomic analysis. Unilateral transfers are alternatively referred to as secondary income payments to distinguish them from primary income payments consisting of cross-border wage and investment income. We will see this terminology later when we study balance of payments accounting.

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these net receipts are primarily the income domestic residents earn on wealth they hold in other countries less the payments domestic residents make to foreign owners of wealth that is located in the domestic country. GDP does not correct, as GNP does, for the portion of countries’ production carried out using services provided by foreign-owned capital and labor. Consider an example: The profits of a Spanish factory with British owners are counted in Spain’s GDP but are part of Britain’s GNP. The services British capital provides in Spain are a service export from Britain; therefore they are added to British GDP in calculating British GNP. At the same time, to figure Spain’s GNP, we must subtract from its GDP the corresponding service import from Britain. As a practical matter, movements in GDP and GNP usually do not differ greatly. We will focus on GNP in this text, however, because GNP tracks national income more closely than GDP does, and national welfare depends more directly on national income than on domestic product.

National Income Accounting for an Open Economy In this section, we extend to the case of an open economy, the closed-economy national income accounting framework you may have seen in earlier economics courses. We begin with a discussion of the national income accounts because they highlight the key role of international trade in open-economy macroeconomic theory. Since a closed economy’s residents cannot purchase foreign output or sell their own to foreigners, all of national income must be allocated to domestic consumption, investment, or government purchases. In an economy open to international trade, however, the closed- economy version of national income accounting must be modified because some domestic output is exported to foreigners while some domestic income is spent on imported foreign products. The main lesson of this section concerns the relationship among national saving, investment, and trade imbalances. We will see that in open economies, saving and investment are not necessarily equal, as they are in a closed economy. This occurs because countries can save in the form of foreign wealth by exporting more than they import, and they can dissave—that is, reduce their foreign wealth—by exporting less than they import.

Consumption The portion of GNP purchased by private households to fulfill current wants is called consumption. Purchases of movie tickets, food, dental work, and washing machines all fall into this category. Consumption expenditure is the largest component of GNP in most economies. In the United States, for example, the fraction of GNP devoted to consumption has fluctuated in a range from about 62 to 70 percent over the past 60 years.

Investment The part of output used by private firms to produce future output is called investment. Investment spending may be viewed as the portion of GNP used to increase the nation’s stock of capital. Steel and bricks used to build a factory are part of investment spending, as are services provided by a technician who helps build business computers. Firms’ purchases of inventories are also counted in investment spending because carrying inventories is just another way for firms to transfer output from current use to future use.

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Investment is usually more variable than consumption. In the United States, (gross) investment has fluctuated between 11 and 22 percent of GNP in recent years. We often use the word investment to describe individual households’ purchases of stocks, bonds, or real estate, but you should be careful not to confuse this everyday meaning of the word with the economic definition of investment as a part of GNP. When you buy a share of Microsoft stock, you are buying neither a good nor a service, so your purchase does not show up in GNP.

Government Purchases Any goods and services purchased by federal, state, or local governments are classified as government purchases in the national income accounts. Included in government purchases are federal military spending, government support of cancer research, and government funds spent on highway repair and education. Government purchases include investment as well as consumption purchases. Government transfer payments such as social security and unemployment benefits do not require the recipient to give the government any goods or services in return. Thus, transfer payments are not included in government purchases. Government purchases currently take up about 17 percent of U.S. GNP, and this share has fallen somewhat since the late 1950s. (The corresponding figure for 1959, for example, was around 22 percent.) In 1929, however, government purchases accounted for only 8.5 percent of U.S. GNP. The National Income Identity for an Open Economy In a closed economy, any final good or service not purchased by households or the government must be used by firms to produce new plant, equipment, and inventories. If consumption goods are not sold immediately to consumers or the government, firms (perhaps reluctantly) add them to existing inventories, thereby increasing their investment. This information leads to a fundamental identity for closed economies. Let Y stand for GNP, C for consumption, I for investment, and G for government purchases. Since all of a closed economy’s output must be consumed, invested, or bought by the government, we can write Y = C + I + G. We derived the national income identity for a closed economy by assuming all output is consumed or invested by the country’s citizens or purchased by its government. When foreign trade is possible, however, some output is purchased by foreigners while some domestic spending goes to purchase goods and services produced abroad. The GNP identity for open economies shows how the national income a country earns by selling its goods and services is divided between sales to domestic residents and sales to foreign residents. Since residents of an open economy may spend some of their income on imports, that is, goods and services purchased from abroad, only the portion of their spending not devoted to imports is part of domestic GNP. The value of imports, denoted by IM, must be subtracted from total domestic spending, C + I + G, to find the portion of domestic spending that generates domestic national income. Imports from abroad add to foreign countries’ GNPs but do not add directly to domestic GNP. Similarly, the goods and services sold to foreigners make up a country’s exports. Exports, denoted by EX, are the amount foreign residents’ purchases add to the national income of the domestic economy.

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The national income of an open economy is therefore the sum of domestic and foreign expenditures on the goods and services produced by domestic factors of production. Thus, the national income identity for an open economy is Y = C + I + G + EX - IM. (13-1)

An Imaginary Open Economy To make identity (13-1) concrete, let’s consider an imaginary closed economy, Agraria, whose only output is wheat. Each citizen of Agraria is a consumer of wheat, but each is also a farmer and therefore can be viewed as a firm. Farmers invest by putting aside a portion of each year’s crop as seed for the next year’s planting. There is also a government that appropriates part of the crop to feed the Agrarian army. Agraria’s total annual crop is 100 bushels of wheat. Agraria can import milk from the rest of the world in exchange for exports of wheat. We cannot draw up the Agrarian national income accounts without knowing the price of milk in terms of wheat because all the components in the GNP identity (13-1) must be measured in the same units. If we assume the price of milk is 0.5 bushel of wheat per gallon, and that at this price, Agrarians want to consume 40 gallons of milk, then Agraria’s imports are equal in value to 20 bushels of wheat. In Table 13-1 we see that Agraria’s total output is 100 bushels of wheat. Consump- tion is divided between wheat and milk, with 55 bushels of wheat and 40 gallons of milk (equal in value to 20 bushels of wheat) consumed over the year. The value of consumption in terms of wheat is 55 + (0.5 * 40) = 55 + 20 = 75. The 100 bushels of wheat produced by Agraria are used as follows: 55 are consumed by domestic residents, 25 are invested, 10 are purchased by the government, and 10 are exported abroad. National income (Y = 100) equals domestic spending (C + I + G = 110) plus exports (EX = 10) less imports (IM = 20). The Current Account and Foreign Indebtedness In reality, a country’s foreign trade is exactly balanced only rarely. The difference between exports of goods and services and imports of goods and services is known as the current account balance (or current account). If we denote the current account by CA, we can express this definition in symbols as CA = EX - IM. When a country’s imports exceed its exports, we say the country has a current account deficit. A country has a current account surplus when its exports exceed its imports.3

TABLE 13-1 National Income Accounts for Agraria, an Open Economy (bushels of wheat) GNP Consumption Investment Government Exports Imports (total output) purchases 100 = 75a + 25 + 10 + 10 - 20b

a55 bushels of wheat + (0.5 bushel per gallon) * (40 gallons of milk). b0.5 bushel per gallon * 40 gallons of milk.

3In addition to net exports of goods and services, the current account balance includes net unilateral transfers of income, which we discussed briefly above. Following our earlier assumption, we continue to ignore such transfers for now to simplify the discussion. Later in this chapter, when we analyze the U.S. balance of payments in detail, we will see how transfers of current income enter the current account.

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The GNP identity, equation (13-1), shows one reason why the current account is important in international macroeconomics. Since the right-hand side of (13-1) gives total expenditures on domestic output, changes in the current account can be associated with changes in output and, thus, employment. The current account is also important because it measures the size and direction of international borrowing. When a country imports more than it exports, it is buying more from foreigners than it sells to them and must somehow finance this current account deficit. How does it pay for additional imports once it has spent its export earnings? Since the country as a whole can import more than it exports only if it can borrow the difference from foreigners, a country with a current account deficit must be increasing its net foreign debts by the amount of the deficit. This is currently the position of the United States, which has a significant current account deficit (and borrowed a sum equal to roughly 3 percent of its GNP in 2015).4 Similarly, a country with a current account surplus is earning more from its exports than it spends on imports. This country finances the current account deficit of its trading partners by lending to them. The foreign wealth of a surplus country rises because foreigners pay for any imports not covered by their exports by issuing IOUs that they will eventually have to redeem. The preceding reasoning shows that a country’s current account balance equals the change in its net foreign wealth.5 We have defined the current account as the difference between exports and imports. Equation (13-1) says that the current account is also equal to the difference between national income and domestic residents’ total spending C + I + G:

Y - (C + I + G) = CA.

It is only by borrowing abroad that a country can have a current account deficit and use more output than it is currently producing. If it uses less than its output, it has a current account surplus and is lending the surplus to foreigners.6 International borrowing and lending were identified with intertemporal trade in Chapter 6. A country with a current account deficit is importing present consumption and exporting future consumption. A country with a current account surplus is exporting present consumption and importing future consumption. As an example, consider again the imaginary economy of Agraria described in Table 13-1. The total value of its consumption, investment, and government purchases, at 110 bushels of wheat, is greater than its output of 100 bushels. This inequality would be impossible in a closed economy; it is possible in this open economy because Agraria

4Alternatively, a country could finance a current account deficit by using previously accumulated foreign wealth to pay for imports. This country would be running down its net foreign wealth, which has the same effect on overall wealth as running up its net foreign debts. Our discussion here is ignoring the possibility that a country receives gifts of foreign assets (or gives such gifts), such as when one country agrees to forgive another’s debts. As we will discuss below, such asset transfers (unlike transfers of current income) are not part of the current account, but they nonetheless do affect net foreign wealth. They are recorded in the capital account of the balance of payments. 5Alas, this statement is also not exactly correct, because there are factors that influence net foreign wealth that are not captured in the national income and product accounts. We will abstract from this fact until this chapter’s concluding Case Study. 6The sum A = C + I + G is often called domestic absorption in the literature on international macro economics. Using this terminology, we can describe the current account surplus as the difference between income and absorption, Y - A.

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now imports 40 gallons of milk, worth 20 bushels of wheat, but exports only 10 bushels of wheat. The current account deficit of 10 bushels is the value of Agraria’s borrowing from foreigners, which the country will have to repay in the future. Figure 13-2 gives a vivid illustration of how a string of current account deficits can add up to a large foreign debt. The figure plots the U.S. current account balance since the late 1970s along with a measure of the nation’s stock of net foreign wealth, its net international investment position (or IIP), the difference between its claims on foreigners and its liabilities to them. As you can see, the United States had accumulated a positive stock of foreign wealth by the early 1980s, after which a sustained current account deficit of proportions unprecedented in the 20th century opened up. In 1989, the country became a net debtor to foreigners for the first time since World War I. That foreign debt has continued to grow, and at the start of 2016, it stood at about 40 percent of GNP.

Saving and the Current Account Simple as it is, the GNP identity has many illuminating implications. To explain the most important of these implications, we define the concept of national saving, that is, the portion of output, Y, that is not devoted to household consumption, C, or government

Current account, net foreign wealth (billions of dollars) 1,000 Current account 0

–1,000

–2,000

–3,000 Net foreign wealth –4,000

–5,000

–6,000

–7,000

–8,000 1976 1979 1982 1985 1988 1991 1994 1997 2000 2003 2006 2009 2012 2015

FIGURE 13-2 Pearson MyLab Economics Real-time data The U.S. Current Account and Net International Investment Position, 1976–2015 A string of current account deficits starting in the early 1980s reduced America’s net foreign wealth until, by the early 21st century, the country had accumulated a substantial net foreign debt.

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis.

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purchases, G.7 In a closed economy, national saving always equals investment. This tells us that the closed economy as a whole can increase its wealth only by accumulating new capital. Let S stand for national saving. Our definition of S tells us that S = Y - C - G. Since the closed-economy GNP identity, Y = C + I + G, may also be written as I = Y - C - G, then S = I, and national saving must equal investment in a closed economy. Whereas in a closed economy, saving and investment must always be equal, in an open economy they can differ. Remembering that national saving, S, equals Y - C - G and that CA = EX - IM, we can rewrite the GNP identity (13-1) as S = I + CA. The equation highlights an important difference between open and closed economies: An open economy can save either by building up its capital stock or by acquiring foreign wealth, but a closed economy can save only by building up its capital stock. Unlike a closed economy, an open economy with profitable investment opportunities does not have to increase its saving in order to exploit them. The preceding expression shows that it is possible simultaneously to raise investment and foreign borrowing without changing saving. For example, if New Zealand decides to build a new hydroelectric plant, it can import the materials it needs from the United States and borrow American funds to pay for them. This transaction raises New Zealand’s domestic investment because the imported materials contribute to expanding the country’s capital stock. The transaction also raises New Zealand’s current account deficit by an amount equal to the increase in investment. New Zealand’s saving does not have to change, even though investment rises. For this to be possible, however, U.S. residents must be willing to save more so that the resources needed to build the plant are freed for New Zealand’s use. The result is another example of intertemporal trade, in which New Zealand imports present output (when it borrows from the United States) and exports future output (when it pays off the loan). Because one country’s savings can be borrowed by a second country in order to increase the second country’s stock of capital, a country’s current account surplus is often referred to as its net foreign investment. Of course, when one country lends to another to finance investment, part of the income generated by the investment in future years must be used to pay back the lender. Domestic investment and foreign investment are two different ways in which a country can use current savings to increase its future income.

Private and Government Saving So far our discussion of saving has not stressed the distinction between saving decisions made by the private sector and saving decisions made by the government. Unlike private saving decisions, however, government saving decisions are often made with an

7The U.S. national income accounts assume that government purchases are not used to enlarge the nation’s capital stock. We follow this convention here by subtracting all government purchases from output to calculate national saving. Most other countries’ national accounts distinguish between government consumption and government investment (for example, investment by publicly owned enterprises) and include the latter as part of national saving. Often, however, government investment figures include purchases of military equipment.

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eye toward their effect on output and employment. The national income identity can help us to analyze the channels through which government saving decisions influence domestic macroeconomic conditions. To use the national income identity in this way, we first have to divide national saving into its private and government components. Private saving is defined as the part of disposable income that is saved rather than consumed. Disposable income is national income, Y, less the net taxes collected from households and firms by the government, T. 8 Private saving, denoted Sp, can therefore be expressed as Sp = Y - T - C. Government saving is defined similarly to private saving. The government’s “income” is its net tax revenue, T, while its “consumption” is government purchases, G. If we let Sg stand for government saving, then Sg = T - G. The two types of saving we have defined, private and government, add up to national saving. To see why, recall the definition of national saving, S, as Y - C - G. Then S = Y - C - G = (Y - T - C) + (T - G) = Sp + Sg. We can use the definitions of private and government saving to rewrite the national income identity in a form that is useful for analyzing the effects of government saving decisions on open economies. Because S = Sp + Sg = I + CA,

Sp = I + CA - Sg = I + CA - (T - G) = I + CA + (G - T). (13-2)

Equation (13-2) relates private saving to domestic investment, the current account surplus, and government saving. To interpret equation (13-2), we define the government budget deficit as G - T, that is, as government saving preceded by a minus sign. The government budget deficit measures the extent to which the government is borrowing to finance its expenditures. Equation (13-2) then states that a country’s private saving can take three forms: investment in domestic capital (I), purchases of wealth from foreigners (CA), and purchases of the domestic government’s newly issued debt (G - T).9

THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING DEFICIT

ecause each country’s exports are other coun- missing deficit.” Since that year, the measured Btries’ imports, the world’s current account bal- global current account has been positive. ances must add up to zero. But they don’t. The Given the inevitable errors in collecting accompanying figure shows the pattern in the data. detailed international payments data from many In all but one year between 1980 and 2003, the sum national agencies with differing accuracy and cov- of global current accounts was negative, imply- erage, some discrepancy is unavoidable. What is ing either that surpluses were understated or that puzzling is that the global discrepancy should be deficits were overstated. But in 2004, the “mystery persistently positive or negative. That pattern sug- of the missing surplus” became a “mystery of the gests that something systematic is going on.

8Net taxes are taxes less government transfer payments. The term government refers to the federal, state, and local governments considered as a single unit. 9In a closed economy, the current account is always zero, so equation (13-2) is simply Sp = I + (G - T).

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When the global current account balance was One possible culprit is growing international negative, it was thought that a big contributing trade in services. For example, a big law firm is factor was incomplete reporting of international likely to report its service exports fairly accu- investment income. For example, banks report rately, but the purchases by many of its smaller these to their home governments, but the recipi- customers may escape detection. In a detailed ents, some of whom wish to avoid taxes, may not review of the question, however, The Economist report them at the receiving end. magazine pointed out that errors in measuring Not only have tax authorities become better at merchandise trade have also risen dramatically, enforcing compliance, however, the general level and it is less clear that these would create a sys- of interest rates is now lower than it was in the tematic bias toward an apparent global surplus.* 1980s and 1990s. Better measurement of interna- The mystery remains a mystery. In 2015, it was tional investment income could be responsible for worth $230 billion, or nearly a third of a percent a shrinking negative world current account. But of world output. what could have made it turn positive?

Percent of world output 0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

–0.2

–0.4

–0.6

–0.8

–1 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014

The Global Current Account Discrepancy since 1980 Once big and negative, implying missing current account credits, the global current account balance has become big and positive, implying missing current account debits.

Source: International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook database, April 2016.

*See “Economics Focus: Exports to Mars,” The Economist, November 12, 2011, at http://www.economist.com/node/21538100.

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The Balance of Payments Accounts In addition to national income accounts, government economists and statisticians also keep balance of payments accounts, a detailed record of the composition of the current account balance and of the many transactions that finance it.10 Balance of payments figures are of great interest to the general public, as indicated by the attention that various news media pay to them. But press reports sometimes confuse different measures of international payments flows. Should we be alarmed or cheered by a Wall Street Journal headline proclaiming, “U.S. Chalks Up Record Balance of Payments Deficit”? A thorough understanding of balance of payments accounting will help us evaluate the implications of a country’s international transactions. A country’s balance of payments accounts keep track of both its payments to and its receipts from foreigners. Any transaction resulting in a receipt from foreigners is entered in the balance of payments accounts as a credit. Any transaction resulting in a payment to foreigners is entered as a debit. Three types of international transaction are recorded in the balance of payments: 1. Transactions that arise from the export or import of goods or services and therefore enter directly into the current account. When a French consumer imports American blue jeans, for example, the transaction enters the U.S. balance of payments accounts as a credit on the current account. 2. Transactions that arise from the purchase or sale of financial assets. An asset is any one of the forms in which wealth can be held, such as money, stocks, factories, or government debt. The financial account of the balance of payments records all international purchases or sales of financial assets. When an American company buys a French factory, the transaction enters the U.S. balance of payments as a debit in the financial account. It enters as a debit because the transaction requires a payment from the United States to foreigners. Correspondingly, a U.S. sale of assets to foreigners enters the U.S. financial account as a credit. The difference between a country’s purchases and sales of foreign assets is called its financial account balance, or its net financial flows. 3. Certain other activities resulting in transfers of wealth between countries are recorded in the capital account. These international asset movements—which are generally very small for the United States—differ from those recorded in the financial account. For the most part they result from nonmarket activities or represent the acquisition or disposal of nonproduced, nonfinancial, and possibly intangible assets (such as copyrights and trademarks). For example, if the U.S. government forgives $1 billion in debt owed to it by the government of Pakistan, U.S. wealth declines by $1 billion and a $1 billion debit is recorded in the U.S. capital account. You will find the complexities of the balance of payments accounts less confusing if you keep in mind the following simple rule of double-entry bookkeeping: Every international transaction automatically enters the balance of payments twice, once as a credit and

10The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has changed its balance of payments presentation to conform to prevailing international standards, so our discussion in this chapter differs in some respects from that in earlier editions of this book. We follow the new methodology described by Kristy L. Howell and Robert E. Yuskavage, “Modernizing and Enhancing BEA’s International Economic Accounts: Recent Progress and Future Directions,” Survey of Current Business (May 2010), pp. 6–20. The BEA completed the full transition to the new system in June 2014. For an update, see Jeffrey R. Bogen, Mai-Chi Hoang, Kristy L. Howell, and Erin M. Whitaker, “Comprehensive Restructuring and Annual Revision of the U.S. International Transac- tions Accounts,” Survey of Current Business (July 2014), pp. 1–24.

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once as a debit. This principle of balance of payments accounting holds true because every transaction has two sides: If you buy something from a foreigner, you must pay him in some way, and the foreigner must then somehow spend or store your payment.

Examples of Paired Transactions Some examples will show how the principle of double-entry bookkeeping operates in practice. 1. Imagine you buy an ink-jet fax machine from the Italian company Olivetti and pay for your purchase with a $1,000 check. Your payment to buy a good (the fax machine) from a foreign resident enters the U.S. current account as a debit. But where is the offsetting balance of payments credit? Olivetti’s U.S. salesperson must do something with your check—let’s say he deposits it in Olivetti’s account at Citibank in New York. In this case, Olivetti has purchased, and Citibank has sold, a U.S. asset—a bank deposit worth $1,000—and the transaction shows up as a $1,000 credit in the U.S. financial account. The transaction creates the following two offsetting bookkeeping entries in the U.S. balance of payments:

Credit Debit Fax machine purchase (Current account, U.S. good import) $1,000 Sale of bank deposit by Citibank (Financial account, U.S. asset sale) $1,000

2. As another example, suppose that during your travels in France, you pay $200 for a fine dinner at the Restaurant de l’Escargot d’Or. Lacking cash, you place the charge on your Visa credit card. Your payment, which is a tourist expenditure, will be counted as a service import for the United States, and therefore as a current account debit. Where is the offsetting credit? Your signature on the Visa slip entitles the restaurant to receive $200 (actually, its local currency equivalent) from First Card, the company that issued your Visa card. It is therefore an asset, a claim on a future payment from First Card. So when you pay for your meal abroad with your credit card, you are selling an asset to France and generating a $200 credit in the U.S. financial account. The pattern of offsetting debits and credits in this case is:

Credit Debit Meal purchase (Current account, U.S. service import) $200 Sale of claim on First Card (Financial account, U.S. $200 asset sale)

3. Imagine next that your Uncle Sid from Los Angeles buys a newly issued share of stock in the U.K. oil giant British Petroleum (BP). He places his order with his U.S. stockbroker, Go-for-Broke, Inc., paying $95 with funds from his Go-for- Broke money market account. BP, in turn, deposits the $95 Sid has paid into its own U.S. bank account at Second Bank of Chicago. Uncle Sid’s acquisition of the stock creates a $95 debit in the U.S. financial account (he has purchased an

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asset from a foreign resident, BP), while BP’s $95 deposit at its Chicago bank is the offsetting financial account credit (BP has expanded its U.S. asset holdings). The mirror-image effects on the U.S. balance of payments therefore both appear in the financial account:

Credit Debit Uncle Sid’s purchase of a share of BP (Financial $95 account, U.S. asset purchase) BP’s deposit of Uncle Sid’s payment at Second Bank of $95 Chicago (Financial account, U.S. asset sale)

4. Finally, let’s consider how the U.S. balance of payments accounts are affected when U.S. banks forgive (that is, announce that they will simply forget about) $5,000 in debt owed to them by the government of the imaginary country of Bygonia. In this case, the United States makes a $5,000 capital transfer to Bygonia, which appears as a $5,000 debit entry in the capital account. The associated credit is in the financial account, in the form of a $5,000 reduction in U.S. assets held abroad (a negative “acquisition” of foreign assets, and therefore a balance of payments credit):

Credit Debit U.S. banks’ debt forgiveness $5,000 (Capital account, U.S. transfer payment) Reduction in banks’ claims on Bygonia $5,000 (Financial account, U.S. asset sale)

These examples show that many circumstances can affect the way a transaction generates its offsetting balance of payments entry. We can never predict with certainty where the flip side of a particular transaction will show up, but we can be sure that it will show up somewhere.

The Fundamental Balance of Payments Identity Because any international transaction automatically gives rise to offsetting credit and debit entries in the balance of payments, the sum of the current account balance and the capital account balance automatically equals the financial account balance:

Current account + capital account = Financial account. (13-3)

In examples 1, 2, and 4 previously, current or capital account entries have offsetting counterparts in the financial account, while in example 3, two financial account entries offset each other. You can understand this identity another way. Recall the relationship linking the current account to international lending and borrowing. Because the sum of the current and capital accounts is the total change in a country’s net foreign assets (including, through the capital account, nonmarket asset transfers), that sum necessarily equals the difference between a country’s purchases of assets from foreigners and its sales of assets to them—that is, the financial account balance (also called net financial flows).

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We now turn to a more detailed description of the balance of payments accounts, using as an example the U.S. accounts for 2015.

The Current Account, Once Again As you have learned, the current account balance measures a country’s net exports of goods and services. Table 13-2 shows that U.S. exports (on the credit side) were $3,044.08 billion in 2015, while U.S. imports (on the debit side) were $3,362.06 billion. The balance of payments accounts divide exports and imports into three finer categories. The first is goods trade, that is, exports or imports of merchandise. The second category, services, includes items such as payments for legal assistance, tourists’ expenditures, and shipping fees. The final category, income, is made up mostly of international interest and dividend payments and the earnings of domestically owned firms

Pearson MyLab Economics Real-time data TABLE 13-2 U.S. Balance of Payments Accounts for 2015 (billions of dollars) Current Account (1) Exports 3,044.08 Of which: Goods 1,510.30 Services 750.86 Income receipts (primary income) 782.92 (2) Imports 3,362.06 Of which: Goods 2,272.87 Services 488.66 Income payments (primary income) 600.53 (3) Net unilateral transfers (secondary income) 144.99 Balance on current account 462.97 [(1) - (2) + (3)] Capital Account (4) 0.04 Financial Account (5) Net U.S. acquisition of financial assets, excluding financial derivatives 225.40 Of which: Official reserve assets -6.29 Other assets 231.69 (6) Net U.S. incurrence of liabilities, excluding financial derivatives 395.23 Of which: Official reserve assets -98.10 Other assets 493.33 (7) Financial derivatives, net 25.39 Net financial flows 195.23 [(5) - (6) + (7)] Statistical Discrepancy 267.78 [Net financial flows less sum of current and capital accounts]

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, June 16, 2016, release. Totals may differ from sums because of rounding.

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operating abroad. If you own a share of a German firm’s stock and receive a dividend payment of $5, that payment shows up in the accounts as a U.S. investment income receipt of $5. Wages that workers earn abroad can also enter the income account. We include income on foreign investments in the current account because that income really is compensation for the services provided by foreign investments. This idea, as we saw earlier, is behind the distinction between GNP and GDP. When a U.S. corporation builds a plant in Canada, for instance, the productive services the plant generates are viewed as a service export from the United States to Canada equal in value to the profits the plant yields for its American owner. To be consistent, we must be sure to include these profits in American GNP and not in Canadian GNP. Remember, the definition of GNP refers to goods and services generated by a country’s factors of production, but it does not specify that those factors must work within the borders of the country that owns them. The earnings of capital and labor working abroad are referred to as “primary income.” Before calculating the current account, we must include one additional type of international transaction that we have largely ignored until now. In discussing the relationship between GNP and national income, we defined unilateral transfers between countries as international gifts, that is, payments that do not correspond to the purchase of any good, service, or asset. Such payments are referred to as “secondary income.” Net unilateral transfers are considered part of the current account as well as a part of national income, and the identity Y = C + I + G + CA holds exactly if Y is interpreted as GNP plus net transfers. In 2015, the U.S. balance of unilateral transfers was - +144.99 billion. The table shows a 2015 current account balance of +3,044.08 billion - +3,362.06 billion - +144.99 billion = - +462.97 billion, a deficit. The negative sign means that current payments to foreigners exceeded current receipts and that U.S. residents used more output than they produced. Since these current account transactions were paid for in some way, we know that this $462.97 billion net debit entry must be offset by a net $462.97 billion credit elsewhere in the balance of payments.

The Capital Account The capital account entry in Table 13-2 shows that in 2015, the United States payed about $40 million in net capital transfers. The net balance of - +40 million is a balance of payments debit. After we add it to the payments deficit implied by the current account, we find that the United States’ need to cover its excess payments to foreigners is increased very slightly, from $462.97 billion to $463.01 billion. Because an excess of national spending over income must be covered by net borrowing from foreigners, this negative current plus capital account balance must be matched by an equal negative balance of net financial flows, representing the net liabilities the United States incurred to foreigners in 2015 in order to fund its deficit. The Financial Account While the current account is the difference between sales of goods and services to foreigners and purchases of goods and services from them, the financial account measures the difference between acquisitions of assets from foreigners and the buildup of liabilities to them. When the United States borrows $1 from foreigners, it is selling them an asset—a promise that they will be repaid $1, with interest, in the future. Likewise, when the United States lends abroad, it acquires an asset: the right to claim future repayment from foreigners. To cover its 2015 current plus capital account deficit of $463.01 billion, the United States needed to borrow from foreigners (or otherwise sell assets to them) in the net

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amount of $463.01 billion. We can look again at Table 13-2 to see exactly how this net sale of assets to foreigners came about. The table records separately U.S. acquisitions of foreign financial assets (which are balance of payments debits, because the United States must pay foreigners for those assets) and increases in foreign claims on residents of the United States (which are balance of payments credits, because the United States receives payments when it sells assets overseas). These data on increases in U.S. asset holdings abroad and foreign holdings of U.S. assets do not include holdings of financial derivatives, which are a class of assets that are more complicated than ordinary stocks and bonds, but have values that can depend on stock and bond values. (We will describe some specific derivative securities in the next chapter.) Starting in 2006, the U.S. Department of Commerce was able to assemble data on net cross-border derivative flows for the United States (U.S. net purchases of foreign-issued derivatives less foreign net purchases of U.S.-issued derivatives). Deriva- tives transactions enter the balance of payments accounts in the same way as do other international asset transactions. According to Table 13-2, U.S.-owned assets abroad (other than derivatives) increased (on a net basis) by $225.40 billion in 2015. The figure is “on a net basis” because some U.S. residents bought foreign assets while others sold foreign assets they already owned, the difference between U.S. gross purchases and sales of foreign assets being $225.40 billion. In the same year (again on a net basis), the United States incurred new liabilities to foreigners equal to $395.23 billion. Some U.S. residents undoubtedly repaid foreign debts, but new borrowing from foreigners exceeded these repayments by $395.23 billion. The balance of U.S. purchases and sales of financial derivatives was - +25.39 billion: The United States acquired derivative claims on foreigners that were lower in value than the derivative claims on the U.S. that foreigners acquired. We calculate the balance on financial account (net financial flows) as +225.40 billion - +395.23 billion - +25.39 billion = - +195.23 billion. The negative value for net financial flows means that in 2015, the United States increased its net liability to foreigners (liabilities minus assets) by $195.23 billion.

Statistical Discrepancy We come out with net financial flows of - +195.23 billion rather than the –$463.01 billion that we’d expected as a result of adding up the current and capital account balances. According to our data on trade and financial flows, the United States incurred $267.78 billion less in foreign debt than it actually needed to fund its current plus capital account deficit—because (- +195.23 billion) - (- +463.01 billion) = +267.78 billion. If every balance of payments credit automatically generates an equal counterpart debit and vice versa, how is this difference possible? The reason is that information about the offsetting debit and credit items associated with a given transaction may be collected from different sources. For example, the import debit that a shipment of DVD players from Japan generates may come from a U.S. customs inspector’s report and the corresponding financial account credit from a report by the U.S. bank in which the check paying for the DVD players is deposited. Because data from different sources may differ in coverage, accuracy, and timing, the balance of payments accounts seldom balance in practice as they must in theory. Account keepers force the two sides to balance by adding to the accounts a statistical discrepancy item. For 2015, unrecorded (or misrecorded) international transactions generated a balancing accounting credit of $267.78 billion— the difference between the recorded net financial flows and the sum of the recorded current and capital accounts.

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We have no way of knowing exactly how to allocate this discrepancy among the current, capital, and financial accounts. (If we did, it wouldn’t be a discrepancy!) The financial account is the most likely culprit, since it is notoriously difficult to keep track of the complicated financial trades between residents of different countries. But we cannot conclude that net financial flows were $267.78 billion lower than recorded because the current account is also highly suspect. Balance of payments accountants consider merchandise trade data relatively reliable, but data on services are not. Service transactions such as sales of financial advice and computer programming assistance may escape detection. Accurate measurement of international interest and dividend receipts can be particularly difficult.

Official Reserve Transactions Although there are many types of financial account transactions, one type is important enough to merit separate discussion. This type of transaction is the purchase or sale of official reserve assets by central banks. An economy’s central bank is the institution responsible for managing the supply of money. In the United States, the central bank is the Federal Reserve System. Official international reserves are foreign assets held by central banks as a cushion against national economic misfortune. At one time, official reserves consisted largely of gold, but today, central banks’ reserves include substantial foreign financial assets, particularly U.S. dollar assets such as Treasury bills. The Federal Reserve itself holds only a small level of official reserve assets other than gold; its own holdings of U.S. dollar assets are not considered international reserves. Central banks often buy or sell international reserves in private asset markets to affect macroeconomic conditions in their economies. Official transactions of this type are called official foreign exchange intervention. One reason why foreign exchange intervention can alter macroeconomic conditions is that it is a way for the central bank to inject money into the economy or withdraw it from circulation. We will have much more to say later about the causes and consequences of foreign exchange intervention. Government agencies other than central banks may hold foreign reserves and intervene officially in exchange markets. The U.S. Treasury, for example, operates an Exchange Stabilization Fund that at times has played an active role in market trading. Because the operations of such agencies usually have no noticeable impact on the money supply, however, we will simplify our discussion by speaking (when it is not too misleading) as if the central bank alone holds foreign reserves and intervenes. When a central bank purchases or sells a foreign asset, the transaction appears in its country’s financial account just as if the same transaction had been carried out by a private citizen. A transaction in which the central bank of Japan (the Bank of Japan) acquires dollar assets might occur as follows: A U.S. auto dealer imports a Nissan sedan from Japan and pays the auto company with a check for $20,000. Nissan does not want to invest the money in dollar assets, but it so happens that the Bank of Japan is willing to give Nis- san Japanese money in exchange for the $20,000 check. The Bank of Japan’s international reserves rise by $20,000 as a result of the deal. Because the Bank of Japan’s dollar reserves are part of total Japanese assets held in the United States, the latter rise by $20,000. This transaction therefore results in a $20,000 credit in the U.S. financial account, the other side of the $20,000 debit in the U.S. current account due to the import of the car.11

11To test your understanding, see if you can explain why the same sequence of actions causes a $20,000 improvement in Japan’s current account and a $20,000 increase in its net financial flows.

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Table 13-2 shows that in 2015, U.S. official reserve assets fell by $6.29 billion. As shown in the table, foreign central banks sold $98.10 billion of the U.S. reserves they previously held. The net increase in U.S. official reserves less the increase in foreign official reserve claims on the United States is the level of net central bank financial flows, which stood at - +6.29 billion - (- +98.10) = +91.81 billion in 2015. You can think of this $91.81 billion net central bank financial flow as measuring the degree to which monetary authorities in the United States and abroad generated additional net U.S. claims on foreigners—which help to finance the U.S. current account deficit when the number is negative, but increase the need for private foreign financing when it is positive. In the example above, the Bank of Japan, by acquiring a $20,000 U.S. bank deposit, indirectly finances an American import of a $20,000 Japanese car. The level of net central bank financial flows is called the official settlements balance or (in less for- mal usage) the balance of payments. This balance is the sum of the current account and capital account balances, less the nonreserve portion of the financial account balance, and it indicates the role of central banks’ official reserve transactions in offsetting the current account balance. Thus, the U.S. balance of payments in 2015 was $91.81 billion. The balance of payments played an important historical role as a measure of dis- equilibrium in international payments, and for many countries it still plays this role. A negative balance of payments (a deficit) may signal a crisis, for it means that a country is running down its international reserve assets or incurring debts to foreign monetary authorities. If a country faces the risk of being suddenly cut off from foreign loans, it will want to maintain a “war chest” of international reserves as a precaution. Many developing countries, in particular, are in this position (see Chapter 22). Like any summary measure, however, the balance of payments must be interpreted with caution. To return to our running example, the Bank of Japan’s decision to expand its U.S. bank deposit holdings by $20,000 swells the measured U.S. balance of payments deficit by the same amount. Suppose the Bank of Japan instead places its $20,000 with Barclays Bank in London, which in turn deposits the money with Citibank in New York. The United States incurs an extra $20,000 in liabilities to private foreigners in this case, and the U.S. balance of payments deficit does not rise. But this “improvement” in the balance of payments is of little economic importance: It makes no real difference to the United States whether it borrows the Bank of Japan’s money directly or through a London bank.

CASE STUDY The Assets and Liabilities of the World’s Biggest Debtor We saw earlier that the current account balance measures the flow of new net claims on foreign wealth that a country acquires by exporting more goods and services than it imports. This flow is not, however, the only important factor that causes a country’s net foreign wealth to change. In addition, changes in the market price of wealth previously acquired can alter a country’s net foreign wealth. When Japan’s stock market lost three-quarters of its value over the 1990s, for example, American and European owners of Japanese shares saw the value of their claims on Japan plummet, and Japan’s net foreign wealth increased as a result. Exchange

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rate changes have a similar effect. When the dollar depreciates against foreign currencies, for example, foreigners who hold dollar assets see their wealth fall when measured in their home currencies. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce, which oversees the vast job of data collection behind the U.S. national income and balance of payments statistics, reports annual estimates of the net interna tional investment position of the United States—the country’s foreign assets less its foreign liabilities. Because asset price and exchange rate changes alter the dol lar values of foreign assets and liabilities alike, the BEA must adjust the values of existing claims to reflect such capital gains and losses in order to estimate U.S. net foreign wealth. These estimates show that at the end of 2015, the United States had a negative net foreign wealth position far greater than that of any other country. Until 1991, foreign direct investments such as foreign factories owned by U.S. corporations were valued at their historical, that is, original, purchase prices. Now the BEA uses two different methods to place current values on foreign direct investments: the current cost method, which values direct investments at the cost of buying them today, and the market value method, which is meant to measure the price at which the investments could be sold. These methods can lead to dif ferent valuations because the cost of replacing a particular direct investment and the price it would command if sold on the market may be hard to measure. (The net foreign wealth data graphed in Figure 13-2 are current cost estimates, which are believed to be more accurate.) Table 13-3 reproduces the BEA’s account of how it made its valuation adjust ments to find the U.S. net IIP at the end of 2015. This “headline” estimate values direct investments at current cost. Starting with its estimate of 2014 net foreign wealth (- +7,046.1 billion), the BEA added the amount of the 2015 U.S. net finan cial flow of - +195.2 billion—recall the figure reported in Table 13-2. Then the BEA adjusted the values of previously held assets and liabilities for various changes in their dollar prices. As a result of these valuation changes, U.S. net foreign wealth fell by an amount greater than the $195.2 billion in new net borrowing from foreigners—in fact, U.S. net foreign wealth declined by $234.5 billion. The BEA’s 2015 estimate of U.S. net foreign wealth, therefore, was - +7,280.6 billion. This debt is larger than the total foreign debt owed by all the Central and Eastern European countries, which was about $822 billion in 2014. To put these figures in perspective, however, it is important to realize that the U.S. net foreign debt amounted to about 40 percent of its GDP, while the foreign liability of Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the other Central and Eastern European debtors was about 55 percent of their collective GDP! Thus, the U.S. external debt represents a lower domestic income drain. Changes in exchange rates and securities prices have the potential to change the U.S. net foreign debt sharply, however, because the gross foreign assets and liabilities of the United States have become so large in recent years. Figure 13-3 illustrates this dramatic trend. In 1976, U.S. foreign assets stood at only 20 percent of U.S. GDP and liabilities at 15 percent (making the United States a net foreign creditor in the amount of roughly 5 percent of its GDP). In 2015, however, the country’s foreign assets amounted to roughly 130 percent of GDP and its liabilities to roughly 171 percent. The tremendous growth in these stocks of wealth reflects

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TABLE 13-3 Change in the Yearend U.S. Net International Investment Position (billions of dollars)

Change in position in 2015 Attributable to: Yearend Other changes in position Yearend Financial- Line Type of investment position, Changes position, Total account Exchange- r 2014 r Price in volume 2015 transac- Total rate changes and valuations changes 1 tion n.i.e. 2

1 U.S. net international investment position (line 4 less line 35)...... 7,046.1 234.5 195.2 39.3 (4) (4) (4) 7,280.6 2 Net international investment position excluding financial derivatives (line 5 less line 36)...... -7,131.7 -206.2 -169.8 -36.4 781.4 -1,051.5 233.7 -7,337.9 3 Financial derivatives other than reserves, net (line 6 less line 37) 3...... 85.5 -28.3 -25.4 -2.9 (4) (4) (4) 57.2 4 U.S. assets...... 24,717.5 1,376.8 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 23,340.8 5 Assets excluding financial derivatives (sum of lines 7, 10, 21, and 26)...... 21,503.4 -558.0 225.4 -783.4 220.4 -1,141.5 137.7 20,945.4 6 Financial derivatives other than reserves, gross positive fair value (line 15)...... 3,214.1 -818.8 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 2,395.4 By functional category: 7 Direct investment at market value...... 7,133.1 -154.8 348.6 -503.4 -64.7 -449.3 10.5 6,978.3 8 Equity...... 6,045.1 -234.0 316.3 -550.3 -64.7 -449.3 -36.3 5,811.1 9 Debt instruments...... 1,088.1 79.2 32.3 46.9 ...... 46.9 1,167.2 10 Portfolio investment...... 9,704.3 -98.1 154.0 -252.1 323.2 -631.3 56.0 9,606.2 11 Equity and investment fund shares...... 6,770.6 57.6 202.6 -145.0 357.9 -562.9 60.1 6,828.2 12 Debt securities...... 2,933.6 -155.7 -48.6 -107.1 -34.6 -68.4 -4.1 2,777.9 13 Short term...... 447.2 39.1 42.5 -3.4 . . . .. -3.4 0.0 486.2 14 Long term...... 2,486.4 -194.7 -91.1 -103.6 -34.6 -65.0 -4.1 2,291.7 15 Financial derivatives other than reserves, gross positive fair value...... 3,214.1 -818.8 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 2,395.4 16 Over-the-counter contracts...... 3,144.0 -797.3 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 2,346.7 17 Single-currency interest rate contracts...... 2,451.1 -643.7 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 1,807.4 18 Foreign exchange contracts...... 415.4 -73.2 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 342.3 19 Other contracts...... 277.5 -80.4 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 197.1 20 Exchange-traded contracts...... 70.1 -21.5 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 48.6 21 Other investment...... 4,231.8 -254.5 -270.9 16.4 . . . .. -54.7 71.1 3,977.3 22 Currency and deposits...... 1,785.5 -156.9 -194.4 37.5 . . . .. -30.6 68.0 1,628.6 23 Loans...... 2,399.2 -95.3 -74.8 -20.5 . . . .. -23.6 3.1 2,304.0 24 Insurance technical reserves...... n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. 25 Trade credit and advances...... 47.0 -2.3 -1.7 -0.6 . . . .. -0.6 0.0 44.7 26 Reserve assets...... 434.3 -50.7 -6.3 -44.4 -38.2 -6.2 0.0 383.6 27 Monetary gold...... 315.4 -38.2 0.0 -38.2 -38.2 . . . .. 0.0 277.2 28 Special drawing rights...... 51.9 -2.3 (*) -2.3 . . . .. -2.3 0.0 49.7 29 Reserve position in the International Monetary Fund...... 25.2 -7.6 -6.5 -1.1 . . . .. -1.1 0.0 17.6 30 Other reserve assets...... 41.8 -2.7 0.2 -2.8 0.0 -2.8 0.0 39.1 31 Currency and deposits...... 19.0 -1.4 (*) -1.4 . . . .. -1.5 0.1 17.6 32 Securities...... 22.8 -1.2 0.2 -1.4 0.0 -1.4 -0.1 21.6 33 Financial derivatives...... 34 Other claims...... 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 . . . .. 0.0 0.0 0.0 35 U.S. liabilities...... 31,763.7 1,142.3 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 30,621.4 36 Liabilities excluding financial derivatives (sum of lines 38, 41, and 56)...... 28,635.1 -351.8 395.2 -747.0 -561.0 -90.0 -96.0 28,283.3 37 Financial derivatives other than reserves, gross negative fair value (line 50)...... 3,128.6 -790.5 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 2,338.1 By functional category: 38 Direct investment at market value...... 6,350.1 193.8 379.4 -185.7 -160.3 . . . .. -25.3 6,543.8 39 Equity...... 4,884.1 95.2 301.1 -205.9 -160.3 . . . .. -45.6 4,979.3 40 Debt instruments...... 1,466.0 98.6 78.3 20.2 ...... 20.2 1,564.5 41 Portfolio investment...... 16,919.8 -242.8 250.9 -493.7 -400.7 -57.0 -36.0 16,677.0 42 Equity and investment fund shares...... 6,642.5 -423.6 -178.3 -245.4 -187.8 . . . .. -57.5 6,218.9 43 Debt securities...... 10,277.3 180.8 429.2 -248.4 -212.9 -57.0 21.5 10,458.1 44 Short term...... 911.8 43.4 45.8 -2.4 . . . .. -2.4 0.0 955.2 45 Treasury bills and certificates...... 671.6 53.1 53.1 0.0 ...... 0.0 724.7 46 Other short-term securities...... 240.2 -9.7 -7.3 -2.4 . . . .. -2.4 0.0 230.5 47 Long term...... 9,365.5 137.5 383.4 -246.0 -212.9 -54.6 21.5 9,503.0 48 Treasury bonds and notes...... 5,484.4 -61.0 -4.8 -56.3 -56.3 . . . .. 0.0 5,423.4 49 Other long-term securities...... 3,881.1 198.5 388.2 -189.7 -156.6 -54.6 21.5 4,079.6 50 Financial derivatives other than reserves, gross negative fair value...... 3,128.6 -790.5 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 2,338.1 51 Over-the-counter contracts...... 3,062.6 -771.5 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 2,291.1 52 Single-currency interest rate contracts...... 2,398.8 -643.4 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 1,755.4 53 Foreign exchange contracts...... 393.6 -49.6 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 344.0 54 Other contracts...... 270.2 -78.5 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 191.7 55 Exchange-traded contracts...... 66.0 -19.0 (3) (3) (3) (3) (3) 47.0 56 Other investment...... 5,365.2 -302.7 -235.1 -67.6 . . . .. -33.0 -34.6 5,062.5

M13_KRUG4870_11_GE_C13.indd 371 13/10/17 11:00 pm 372 Part THREE ■ Exchange Rates and Open-Economy Macroeconomics

57 Currency and deposits...... 2,886.7 27.5 33.4 -5.9 . . . .. -10.8 4.9 2,914.3 58 Loans...... 2,265.6 -342.0 -282.7 -59.3 . . . .. -19.7 -39.5 1,923.6 59 Insurance technical reserves...... n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. 60 Trade credit and advances...... 161.7 13.9 14.2 -0.3 . . . .. -0.3 0.0 175.6 61 Special drawing rights allocations...... 51.2 -2.2 0.0 -2.2 . . . .. -2.2 0.0 48.9 r Revised n.a. Not available . . . . Not applicable (*) Value between zero and + - +50 million 1. Represents gains or losses on foreign-currency-denominated assets and liabilities due> to their revaluation at current exchange rates. 2. Includes changes due to year-to-year shifts in the composition of reporting panels and to the incorporation of more comprehensive survey results. Also includes capital gains and losses of direct investment affiliates and changes in positions that cannot be allocated to financial transactions, price changes, or exchange-rate changes. 3. Financial transactions and other changes in financial derivatives positions are available only on a net basis, which is shown on line 3; they are not separately available for gross positive fair values and gross negative fair values of financial derivatives. 4. Data are not separately available for price changes, exchange-rate changes, and changes in volume and valuation not included elsewhere. Note: Details may not add to totals because of rounding. Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Assets, liabilities (ratio to GDP) 2.0

1.8

1.6

1.4

Gross foreign liabilities 1.2

1.0

0.8

0.6

Gross foreign assets 0.4

0.2

0.0 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 19961998 20002002 2004 20062008 201020122014

FIGURE 13-3 Pearson MyLab Economics Real-time data Gross Foreign Assets and Liabilities, 1976–2015 Since 1976, both the foreign assets and the liabilities of the United States have increased sharply. But liabilities have risen more quickly, leaving the United States with a substantial net foreign debt.

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, June 2016.

M13_KRUG4870_11_GE_C13.indd 372 13/10/17 11:00 pm CHAPTER 13 ■ National Income Accounting and the Balance of Payments 373

the rapid globalization of financial markets in the late 20th century, a phenom enon we will discuss further in Chapter 20. Think about how gross wealth positions of this magnitude amplify the effects of exchange rate changes, however. Suppose 70 percent of U.S. foreign assets are denominated in foreign currencies, but all U.S. liabilities to foreigners are denominated in dollars (these are approximately the correct numbers). Because in 2015 U.S. GDP was around $18 trillion, a 10 percent depreciation of the dollar would leave U.S. liabilities unchanged but would increase U.S. assets (measured in dollars) by 0.1 * 0.7 * 1.30 = 9.1 percent of GDP, or about $1.6 trillion. This number is approximately 3.4 times the U.S. current account deficit of 2015! Indeed, due to sharp movements in exchange rates and stock prices, the U.S. economy lost about $800 billion in this way between 2007 and 2008 and gained a comparable amount between 2008 and 2009 (see Figure 13-2). The correspond ing redistribution of wealth between foreigners and the United States would have been much smaller back in 1976. Does this possibility mean that policy makers should ignore their countries’ current accounts and instead try to manipulate currency values to prevent large buildups of net foreign debt? That would be a perilous strategy because, as we will see in Chapter 14, expectations of future exchange rates are central to market par ticipants’ behavior. Systematic government attempts to reduce foreign investors’ wealth through exchange rate changes would sharply reduce foreigners’ demand for domestic currency assets, thus decreasing or eliminating any wealth benefit from depreciating the home currency.

SUMMARY

1. International macroeconomics is concerned with the full employment of scarce economic resources and price level stability throughout the world economy. Because they reflect national expenditure patterns and their international repercussions, the national income accounts and the balance of payments accounts are essential tools for studying the macroeconomics of open, interdependent economies. 2. A country’s gross national product (GNP) is equal to the income received by its factors of production. The national income accounts divide national income according to the types of spending that generate it: consumption, investment, government purchases, and the current account balance. Gross domestic product (GDP), equal to GNP less net receipts of factor income from abroad, measures the output produced within a country’s territorial borders. 3. In an economy closed to international trade, GNP must be consumed, invested, or purchased by the government. By using current output to build plant, equipment, and inventories, investment transforms present output into future output. For a closed economy, investment is the only way to save in the aggregate, so the sum of the saving carried out by the private and public sectors, national saving, must equal investment.

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4. In an open economy, GNP equals the sum of consumption, investment, government purchases, and net exports of goods and services. Trade does not have to be balanced if the economy can borrow from and lend to the rest of the world. The difference between the economy’s exports and imports, the current account balance, equals the difference between the economy’s output and its total use of goods and services. 5. The current account also equals the country’s net lending to foreigners. Unlike a closed economy, an open economy can save through domestic and foreign investments. National saving therefore equals domestic investment plus the current account balance. The current account is closely related to the change in the net international investment position, though usually not equal to that change because of fluctuations in asset values not recorded in the national income and product accounts. 6. Balance of payments accounts provide a detailed picture of the composition and financing of the current account. All transactions between a country and the rest of the world are recorded in the country’s balance of payments accounts. The accounts are based on the convention that any transaction resulting in a payment to foreigners is entered as a debit while any transaction resulting in a receipt from foreigners is entered as a credit. 7. Transactions involving goods and services appear in the current account of the balance of payments, while international sales or purchases of assets appear in the financial account. The capital account records mainly nonmarket asset transfers and tends to be small for the United States. The sum of the current and capital account balances must equal the financial account balance (net financial flows). This feature of the accounts reflects the fact that discrepancies between export earnings and import expenditures must be matched by a promise to repay the difference, usually with interest, in the future. 8. International asset transactions carried out by central banks are included in the financial account. Any central bank transaction in private markets for foreign currency assets is called official foreign exchange intervention. One reason intervention is important is that central banks use it as a way to change the amount of money in circulation. A country has a deficit in its balance of payments when it is running down its official international reserves or borrowing from foreign central banks; it has a surplus in the opposite case.

KEY TERMS

asset, p. 362 gross domestic product net international investment balance of payments account- (GDP), p. 353 position, p. 358 ing, p. 351 gross national product official foreign exchange inter- capital account, p. 362 (GNP), p. 351 vention, p. 368 central bank, p. 368 investment, p. 354 official international consumption, p. 354 macroeconomics, p. 349 reserves, p. 368 current account balance, p. 356 microeconomics, p. 349 official settlements balance (or financial account, p. 362 national income, p. 352 balance of payments), p. 369 government budget deficit, national income accounting, private saving, p. 360 p. 360 p. 351 government purchases, p. 355 national saving, p. 358

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PROBLEMS Pearson MyLab Economics

1. We stated in this chapter that GNP accounts avoid double counting by including only the value of final goods and services sold on the market. Should the measure of imports used in the GNP accounts therefore be defined to include only imports of final goods and services from abroad? What about exports? 2. Equation (13-2) tells us that to reduce a current account deficit, a country must increase its private saving, reduce domestic investment, or cut its government budget deficit. Nowadays, some people recommend restrictions on imports from China (and other countries) to reduce the American current account deficit. How would higher U.S. barriers to imports affect its private saving, domestic investment, and government deficit? Do you agree that import restrictions would necessarily reduce a U.S. current account deficit? 3. Explain how each of the following transactions generates two entries—a credit and a debit—in the Japanese balance of payments accounts, and describe how each entry would be classified: a. A Japanese investor buys a share of a stock company in Thailand, paying by writing a check on an account with a Singapore bank. b. A Japanese investor buys a share of a Thai stock company, paying the seller with a check on a Japanese bank. c. The Malaysian government carries out an official foreign exchange intervention in which it uses Yen held in a Japanese bank to buy ringgit (Malaysian currency) from its citizens. d. A tourist from Kyoto buys a meal at an expensive restaurant in Bangkok, paying with a traveler’s check. e. A saké brewery in Kobe contributes a case of saké bottles for a Paris wine- tasting event. f. A Japanese-owned factory in Germany uses local earnings to buy additional machinery. 4. A Mexican travels to Brazil to buy a gemstone which costs 3,000 Real (Brazilian currency). The Brazilian company that sells the gemstone then deposits the 3000 Real in its account in a Panama bank. How would these transactions show up in the balance of payments accounts of Mexico and Brazil? What if the Mexican pays cash for the gemstone? 5. The nation of Pecunia had a current account deficit of $1 billion and a nonreserve financial account surplus of $500 million in 2017. a. What was the balance of payments of Pecunia in that year? What happened to the country’s net foreign assets? b. Assume that foreign central banks neither buy nor sell Pecunian assets. How did the Pecunian central bank’s foreign reserves change in 2017? How would this official intervention show up in the balance of payments accounts of Pecunia? c. How would your answer to (b) change if you learned that foreign central banks had purchased $600 million of Pecunian assets in 2017? How would these official purchases enter foreign balance of payments accounts? d. Draw up the Pecunian balance of payments accounts for 2017 under the assumption that the event described in (c) occurred in that year. 6. Can you think of reasons why a government might be concerned about a large current account deficit or surplus? Why might a government be concerned about its official settlements balance (that is, its balance of payments)? 7. Do the data on the European Central Bank, which set up the official settlements balance for the Eurozone, give an accurate picture of the extent to which foreign central banks buy and sell euros in currency markets?

M13_KRUG4870_11_GE_C13.indd 375 13/10/17 11:00 pm 376 Part THREE ■ Exchange Rates and Open-Economy Macroeconomics

8. Is it possible for a country to have a current account deficit at the same time it has a surplus in its balance of payments? Explain your answer, using hypothetical figures for the current and nonreserve financial accounts. Be sure to discuss the possible implications for official international reserve flows. 9. Suppose the South Africa net foreign debt is 50 percent of its GDP and foreign assets and liabilities pay an interest rate of 6 percent per year. What would be the drain on SA GDP (as a percentage) from paying interest on the net foreign debt? Do you think this is a large number? What if the net foreign debt were 100 percent of GDP? At what point do you think a country’s government should become wor- ried about the size of its foreign debt? 10. In 2015, in the balance of payment of Switzerland, the labor income in the primary income balance shows a deficit of 21 billion CHF (Swiss Franc), which represents almost 30 percent of the net account surplus (71 Billion CHF). How can you explain the size of this deficit? 11. Return to the example in this chapter’s final Case Study of how a 10 percent dollar depreciation affects U.S. net foreign wealth (pp. 369–373). Show the size of the effect on foreigners’ net foreign claims on the United States measured in dollars (as a percent of U.S. GDP). 12. We mentioned in the chapter that capital gains and losses on a country’s net foreign assets are not included in the national income measure of the current account. How would economic statisticians have to modify the national income identity [equation (13-1)] if they wish to include such gains and losses as part of the definition of the current account? In your opinion, would this make sense? Why do you think this is not done in practice? 13. The international investment position of the European Union (28 countries) is negative of €2,557.4 billion in 2015, from €3,337.8 billion in 2014. The breakdown by country is as follows: Assets Liabilities Net Net (% GDP) Belgium 1,972.5 1,719.2 253.3 61.9 Bulgaria 37.9 64.7 –26.8 –60.7 Czech Republic 169.6 221.3 –51.7 –31.0 Denmark 793.8 682.1 111.7 42.0 Germany 7,900.6 6,418.6 1,482.0 49.0 Estonia 28.4 36.7 –8.3 –40.5 Ireland 4,747.4 5,279.5 –532.1 –208.0 Greece 243.4 477.5 –234.1 –133.0 Spain 1,640.9 2,615.8 –974.9 –90.2 France 6,422.1 6,780.2 –358.1 –16.4 Croatia 30.7 64.8 –34.1 –77.6 Italy 2,362.8 2,758.4 –395.6 –24.2 Cyprus 207.5 230.1 –22.5 –129.2 Latvia 30.5 44.9 –14.5 –59.3 Lithuania 22.9 39.7 –16.8 –45.2 Luxembourg 9,470.5 9,454.0 16.5 31.6 Hungary 269.7 339.5 –69.8 –64.1 Malta 223.1 219.1 4.0 45.4 Netherlands 7,583.2 7,171.8 411.4 60.8 Austria 892.9 877.4 15.5 4.6 Poland 209.7 471.2 –261.6 -61.1 Portugal 333.0 529.2 –196.2 -109.4

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Assets Liabilities Net Net (% GDP) Romania 57.7 138.2 –80.6 –50.2 Slovenia 40.3 55.1 –14.8 –38.5 Slovakia 51.8 106.1 –54.3 –69.6 Finland 697.8 705.8 –8.0 –3.8 Sweden 1,299.1 1,305.7 –6.6 –1.5 United Kingdom 13,443.1 13,809.8 –366.6 –14.2

What are the main creditor countries? What are the main debtor countries? Explain. (Hint: refer to the analysis on Eurostat analysis: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Economy_and_finance)

FURTHER READINGS

European Commission, International Monetary Fund, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, United Nations, and World Bank. System of National Accounts 2008. New York: United Nations, 2009. Definitive guidelines for constructing national income and product accounts. William Griever, Gary Lee, and Francis Warnock. “The U.S. System for Measuring Cross-Border Investment in Securities: A Primer with a Discussion of Recent Developments.” Federal Reserve Bulletin 87 (October 2001), pp. 633–650. Critical description of U.S. procedures for measuring foreign assets and liabilities. International Monetary Fund. Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Man- ual, 6th edition. Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 2009. Authoritative treatment of balance of payments accounting. Philip R. Lane and Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti. “The External Wealth of Nations Mark II: Revised and Extended Estimates of Foreign Assets and Liabilities, 1970–2004.” Journal of International Economics 73 (November 2007), pp. 223–250. Applies a common methodology to construct international position data for a large sample of countries. Catherine L. Mann. “Perspectives on the U.S. Current Account Deficit and Sustainability.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 16 (Summer 2002), pp. 131–152. Examines the causes and consequences of recent U.S. current account deficits. James E. Meade. The Balance of Payments, Chapters 1–3. London: Oxford University Press, 1952. A classic analytical discussion of balance of payments concepts. Maurice Obstfeld. “Does the Current Account Still Matter?” American Economic Review 102 (May 2012): pp. 1–23. Discusses the significance of the current account in a world of large two-way international asset flows. Cédric Tille. “The Impact of Exchange Rate Movements on U.S. Foreign Debt.” Current Issues in Economics and Finance (Federal Reserve Bank of New York) 9 (January 2003), pp. 1–7. Discusses the implications of asset price changes for U.S. foreign assets and liabilities.

Pearson MyLab Economics Can Help You Get a Better Grade Pearson MyLab Economics If your exam were tomorrow, would you be ready? For each chapter, Pearson MyLab Economics Practice Tests and Study Plans pinpoint sections you have mastered and those you need to study. That way, you are more efficient with your study time, and you are better prepared for your exams. To see how it works, turn to page 37 and then go to www.myeconlab.com

M13_KRUG4870_11_GE_C13.indd 377 13/10/17 11:00 pm CHAPTER 14

Exchange Rates and the Foreign Exchange Market: An Asset Approach

ver the seven years between mid-2007 and mid-2014, the U.S. dollar’s O price against a basket of major foreign currencies remained roughly constant (despite a temporary rise in the spring of 2009). In the year and a half between mid-2014 and the start of 2016, however, the dollar’s value suddenly rose by a whopping 25 percent. What changes in the U.S. and world economy could possibly have driven such a dramatic change in the foreign exchange market? In this chapter we will begin our study of the causes and effects of exchange rate changes. The price of one currency in terms of another is called an exchange rate. At 4 p.m. London time on January 19, 2017 you would have needed 1.0612 dollars to buy one unit of the European currency, the euro, so the dollar’s exchange rate against the euro was $1.0612 per euro. Because of their strong influence on the current account and other macroeconomic variables, exchange rates are among the most important prices in an open economy. Because an exchange rate, the price of one country’s money in terms of another’s, is also an asset price, the principles governing the behavior of other asset prices also govern the behavior of exchange rates. As you will recall from Chapter 13, the defining characteristic of an asset is that it is a form of wealth, a way of transferring purchasing power from the present into the future. The price an asset commands today is therefore directly related to the purchasing power over goods and services that buyers expect it to yield in the future. Simi- larly, today’s dollar/euro exchange rate is closely tied to people’s expectations about the future level of that rate. Just as the price of Google stock rises immediately upon favorable news about Google’s future prospects, so do exchange rates respond immediately to any news concerning future currency values. Our general goals in this chapter are to understand the role of exchange rates in international trade and to understand how exchange rates are determined. To begin, we first learn how exchange rates allow us to compare the prices of different countries’ goods and services. Next, we describe the international asset market in which currencies are traded and show how equilibrium exchange rates are

378

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determined in that market. A final section underlines our asset market approach by showing how today’s exchange rate responds to changes in the expected future values of exchange rates.

LEARNING GOALS

After reading this chapter, you will be able to: ■■ Relate exchange rate changes to changes in the relative prices of countries’ exports. ■■ Describe the structure and functions of the foreign exchange market. ■■ Use exchange rates to calculate and compare returns on assets denominated in different currencies. ■■ Apply the interest parity condition to find equilibrium exchange rates. ■■ Find the effects of interest rates and expectation shifts on exchange rates.

Exchange Rates and International Transactions Exchange rates play a central role in international trade because they allow us to compare the prices of goods and services produced in different countries. A consumer deciding which of two American cars to buy must compare their dollar prices, for example, $44,500 (for a Lincoln Continental) or $27,000 (for a Ford Taurus). But how is the same consumer to compare either of these prices with the 3,500,000 Japanese yen it costs to buy a Nissan Leaf from Japan? To make this comparison, he or she must know the relative price of dollars and yen. The relative prices of currencies can be viewed in real time on the Internet. Exchange rates are also reported daily in newspapers’ financial sections. Table 14-1 shows the dollar, euro, and pound exchange rates for currencies reported in the Financial Times on January 20, 2017 (these rates correspond to the ones quoted in London at 4 p.m of the previous day, January 19, 2017). An exchange rate can be quoted in two ways: as the price of the foreign currency in terms of dollars (for example, $1.0612 per euro) or as its inverse, the price of dollars in terms of the foreign currency (for example, €0.9424 per dollar). The first of these exchange rate quotations (dollars per foreign currency unit) is said to be in direct (or “American”) terms; the second (foreign currency units per dollar) is in indirect (or “European”) terms.1 Households and firms use exchange rates to translate foreign prices into domestic currency terms. Once the money prices of domestic goods and imports have been expressed in terms of the same currency, households and firms can compute the relative prices that affect international trade flows.

Domestic and Foreign Prices If we know the exchange rate between two countries’ currencies, we can compute the price of one country’s exports in terms of the other country’s money. For example, how many dollars would it cost to buy an Edinburgh Woolen Mill sweater costing

1The “mid” rates shown are the average of “bid” and “ask” prices for the U.S. dollar. Generally, a buyer of dollars will pay more (the ask price) than a seller will receive (the bid price) due to costs of intermediating the trade (for example by a bank or broker). The difference—the bid-ask spread—is a measure of transaction costs. In Chapter 19, we will refer to “effective” exchange rate indexes, which are averages of exchange rates against individual trading partner currencies.

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TABLE 14-1 Exchange Rate Quotations

Source: Financial Times, January 20, 2017.

50 British pounds (£50)? The answer is found by multiplying the price of the sweater in pounds, 50, by the price of a pound in terms of dollars—the dollar’s exchange rate against the pound. At an exchange rate of $1.50 per pound (expressed in American terms), the dollar price of the sweater is (1.50+ £) * (£50) = +75. A change in the dollar/pound exchange> rate would alter the sweater’s dollar price. At an exchange rate of 1.25 per pound, the sweater would cost only

(1.25+ £) * (£50) = +62.50, assuming its price in terms of pounds> remained the same. At an exchange rate of $1.75 per pound, the sweater’s dollar price would be higher, equal to (1.75+ £) * (£50) = +87.50. Changes in exchange rates are described> as depreciations or appreciations. A depreciation of the pound against the dollar is a fall in the dollar price of pounds, for example, a change in the exchange rate from $1.50 per pound to $1.25 per pound. The preceding example shows that all else equal, a depreciation of a country’s currency makes its goods cheaper for foreigners. A rise in the pound’s price in terms of dollars—for example, from $1.50 per pound to $1.75 per pound—is an appreciation of the pound against the dollar. All else equal, an appreciation of a country’s currency makes its goods more expensive for foreigners. The exchange rate changes discussed in the example simultaneously alter the prices Britons pay for American goods. At an exchange rate of $1.50 per pound, the pound price of a pair of American designer jeans costing $45 is (+45) (1.50+ £) = £30. > >

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A change in the exchange rate from $1.50 per pound to $1.25 per pound, while a depreciation of the pound against the dollar, is also a rise in the pound price of dollars, an appreciation of the dollar against the pound. This appreciation of the dollar makes the American jeans more expensive for Britons by raising their pound price from £30 to

(+45) (1.25+ £) = £36. > > The change in the exchange rate from $1.50 per pound to $1.75 per pound—an appreciation of the pound against the dollar but a depreciation of the dollar against the pound—lowers the pound price of the jeans from £30 to

(+45) (1.75+ £) = £25.71. > > As you can see, descriptions of exchange rate changes as depreciations or appreciations can be bewildering because when one currency depreciates against another, the second currency must simultaneously appreciate against the first. To avoid confusion in discussing exchange rates, we must always keep track of which of the two currencies we are examining has depreciated or appreciated against the other. If we remember that a depreciation of the dollar against the pound is at the same time an appreciation of the pound against the dollar, we reach the following conclusion: When a country’s currency depreciates, foreigners find that its exports are cheaper and domestic residents find that imports from abroad are more expensive. An appreciation has opposite effects: Foreigners pay more for the country’s products and domestic consumers pay less for foreign products.

Exchange Rates and Relative Prices Import and export demands, like the demands for all goods and services, are influenced by relative prices, such as the price of sweaters in terms of designer jeans. We have just seen how exchange rates allow individuals to compare domestic and foreign money prices by expressing them in a common currency unit. Carrying this analysis one step further, we can see that exchange rates also allow individuals to compute the relative prices of goods and services whose money prices are quoted in different currencies. An American trying to decide how much to spend on American jeans and how much to spend on British sweaters must translate their prices into a common currency to compute the price of sweaters in terms of jeans. As we have seen, an exchange rate of $1.50 per pound means that an American pays $75 for a sweater priced at £50 in Britain. Because the price of a pair of American jeans is $45, the price of a sweater in terms of a pair of jeans is (+75 per sweater) (+45 per pair of jeans) = 1.67 pairs of jeans per sweater. Naturally, a Briton faces the same relative price of (£50 per sweater) (£30 per pair of jeans) = 1.67 >pairs of jeans per sweater. Table 14-2 shows the relative prices implied by exchange rates of $1.25 per pound, $1.50 per pound,> and $1.75 per pound, on the assumption that the dollar price of jeans and the pound price of sweaters are unaffected by the exchange rate changes. To test your understanding, try to calculate these relative prices for yourself and confirm that the outcome of the calculation is the same for a Briton and for an American.

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TABLE 14-2 + £ Exchange Rates and the Relative Price of American Designer Jeans and British Sweaters > Exchange rate + £ 1.25 1.50 1.75 Relative price (pairs of jeans/sweater) 1.39 1.67 1.94 > Note: The above calculations assume unchanged money prices of $40 per pair of jeans and £50 per sweater.

The table shows that if the goods’ money prices do not change, an appreciation of the dollar against the pound makes sweaters cheaper in terms of jeans (each pair of jeans buys more sweaters) while a depreciation of the dollar against the pound makes sweaters more expensive in terms of jeans (each pair of jeans buys fewer sweaters). The computations illustrate a general principle: All else equal, an appreciation of a country’s currency raises the relative price of its exports and lowers the relative price of its imports. Conversely, a depreciation lowers the relative price of a country’s exports and raises the relative price of its imports.

The Foreign Exchange Market Just as other prices in the economy are determined by the interaction of buyers and sellers, exchange rates are determined by the interaction of the households, firms, and financial institutions that buy and sell foreign currencies to make international payments. The market in which international currency trades take place is called the foreign exchange market.

The Actors The major participants in the foreign exchange market are commercial banks, corporations that engage in international trade, nonbank financial institutions such as asset- management firms and insurance companies, and central banks. Individuals may also participate in the foreign exchange market—for example, the tourist who buys foreign currency at a hotel’s front desk—but such cash transactions are an insignificant fraction of total foreign exchange trading. We now describe the major actors in the market and their roles. 1. Commercial banks. Commercial banks are at the center of the foreign exchange market because almost every sizable international transaction involves the debiting and crediting of accounts at commercial banks in various financial centers. Thus, the vast majority of foreign exchange transactions involve the exchange of bank deposits denominated in different currencies. Let’s look at an example. Suppose ExxonMobil Corporation wishes to pay €160,000 to a German supplier. First, ExxonMobil gets an exchange rate quota- tion from its own commercial bank, the Third National Bank. Then it instructs Third National to debit ExxonMobil’s dollar account and pay €160,000 into the supplier’s account at a German bank. If the exchange rate quoted to ExxonMobil by Third National is $1.2 per euro, +192,000 (= +1.2 per euro * :160,000) is debited from ExxonMobil’s account. The final result of the transaction is the exchange of a $192,000 deposit at Third National Bank (now owned by the German bank that supplied the euros) for the €160,000 deposit used by Third National to pay Exxon- Mobil’s German supplier.

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As the example shows, banks routinely enter the foreign exchange market to meet the needs of their customers—primarily corporations. In addition, a bank will also quote to other banks exchange rates at which it is willing to buy currencies from them and sell currencies to them. Foreign currency trading among banks—called interbank trading—accounts for much of the activity in the foreign exchange market. In fact, the exchange rates listed in Table 14-1 are interbank rates, the rates banks charge each other. No amount less than $1 million is traded at those rates. The rates available to corporate customers, called “retail” rates, are usually less favorable than the “wholesale” interbank rates. The difference between the retail and the wholesale rates is the bank’s compensation for doing the business.

EXCHANGE RATES, AUTO PRICES, AND CURRENCY WARS

utomobiles make up a significant share of weaken their currencies. In September 2010, as Ainternational trade, and many advanced econ- many industrial countries’ currencies depreciated omies are significant exporters as well as importers because of slow economic growth, Brazil’s finance of cars. Competition is fierce—the United States minister accused the richer countries of waging exports Fords, Sweden exports Volvos, Germany “currency wars” against the poorer emerging exports BMWs, Japan exports Hondas, and Brit- market economies. After reading Chapter 17, you ain exports Land Rovers, to name just a few—and will understand why sluggish economic growth increased auto imports from abroad are likely to and currency depreciation might go together. mean fewer sales for the domestic producer. Chapter 18 discusses how a similar phenomenon Exchange rates are therefore of critical impor- of “competitive depreciation” occurred during the tance to automakers. For example, when Korea’s Great Depression of the 1930s. currency, the won, appreciates in the foreign Talk of currency wars emerged once again when exchange market, this hurts Korean producers Japan’s yen depreciated sharply early in 2013, as in two distinct ways. First, the prices of compet- the Japanese government announced new mon- ing imported cars go down because foreign prices etary policies likely to weaken the yen. Of course, look lower when measured in terms of won. Thus, Japanese auto firms were major beneficiaries, at imports flood in and create a more competitive the expense of their many foreign competitors. home pricing environment for Korean producers According to an Associated Press (AP) report in like Hyundai and Kia. Second, foreigners (whose May 2013, Nissan was able to cut the dollar prices currencies have depreciated against the won) find of 7 of the 18 models it sells in the United States: that the home-currency prices of Korean cars have At the new dollar exchange rate of the yen, even risen, and they switch their purchases to cheaper somewhat lower dollar prices produced enough suppliers. Korean auto exports suffer as a result. yen revenue to cover Japanese production costs as Later in the book (Chapter 16) we will discuss well as higher yen profits. Nissan cut the price of the pricing strategies that producers of special- its Altima by $580 and that of its Armada SUV ized products like autos may adopt when trying by $4,400. As the AP reported, “Although Nissan to defend market shares in the face of exchange denies it, industry analysts say the company can rate changes. afford to cut prices because of efforts in Japan to These effects of exchange rates on manufactur- weaken the yen against the dollar. That makes cars ing producers explain why export industries com- and parts made in Japan cheaper than goods made plain when foreign countries adopt policies that in the U.S.”*

*“Nissan Cuts Prices on 7 of Its U.S. Models,” USA Today, May 1, 2013, available at: http://www.usatoday.com/story/ money/cars/2013/05/01/nissan-cuts-prices-juke/2127721/

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Because their international operations are so extensive, large commercial banks are well suited to bring buyers and sellers of currencies together. A multinational corporation wishing to convert $100,000 into Swedish kronor might find it difficult and costly to locate other corporations wishing to sell the right amount of kronor. By serving many customers simultaneously through a single large purchase of kronor, a bank can economize on these search costs. 2. Corporations. Corporations with operations in several countries frequently make or receive payments in currencies other than that of the country in which they are headquartered. To pay workers at a plant in Mexico, for example, IBM may need Mexican pesos. If IBM has only dollars earned by selling computers in the United States, it can acquire the pesos it needs by buying them with its dollars in the foreign exchange market. 3. Nonbank financial institutions. Over the years, deregulation of financial markets in the United States, Japan, and other countries has encouraged nonbank financial institutions such as mutual funds to offer their customers a broader range of services, many of them indistinguishable from those offered by banks. Among these have been services involving foreign exchange transactions. Institutional investors such as pension funds often trade foreign currencies. So do insurance companies. Hedge funds, which cater to very wealthy individuals and are not bound by the government regulations that limit mutual funds’ trading strategies, trade actively in the foreign exchange market. 4. Central banks. In the last chapter, we learned that central banks sometimes intervene in foreign exchange markets. While the volume of central bank transactions is typically not large, the impact of these transactions may be great. The reason for this impact is that participants in the foreign exchange market watch central bank actions closely for clues about future macroeconomic policies that may affect exchange rates. Government agencies other than central banks may also trade in the foreign exchange market, but central banks are the most regular official participants.

Characteristics of the Market Foreign exchange trading takes place in many financial centers, with the largest volumes of trade occurring in such major cities as London (the largest market), New York, Tokyo, Frankfurt, and Singapore. The worldwide volume of foreign exchange trading is enormous, and it has ballooned in recent years. In April 1989, the average total value of global foreign exchange trading was close to $600 billion per day. A total of $184 billion was traded daily in London, $115 billion in the United States, and $111 billion in Tokyo. Twenty-four years later, in April 2013, the daily global value of foreign exchange trading had jumped to around $5.3 trillion. A total of $2.72 trillion was traded daily in Britain, $1.26 trillion in the United States, and $374 billion in Japan.2 Telephone, fax, and Internet links among the major foreign exchange trading centers make each a part of a single world market on which the sun never sets. Economic news

2April 1989 figures come from surveys carried out simultaneously by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Canada, and monetary authorities from France, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia. The April 2013 survey was carried out by 53 central banks. Revised figures are reported in “Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange and Derivatives Market Activity in 2013,” Bank for International Settlements, Basel, Switzerland, February 2014. Daily U.S. foreign currency trading in 1980 averaged only around $18 billion.

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released at any time of the day is immediately transmitted around the world and may set off a flurry of activity by market participants. Even after trading in New York has finished, New York–based banks and corporations with affiliates in other time zones can remain active in the market. Foreign exchange traders may deal from their homes when a late-night communication alerts them to important developments in a financial center on another continent. The integration of financial centers implies that there can be no significant difference between the dollar/euro exchange rate quoted in New York at 9 a.m. and the dollar/euro exchange rate quoted in London at the same time (which corresponds to 2 p.m. London time). If the euro were selling for $1.1 in New York and $1.2 in London, profits could be made through arbitrage, the process of buying a currency cheap and selling it dear. At the prices listed above, a trader could, for instance, purchase €1 million in New York for $1.1 million and immediately sell the euros in London for $1.2 million, making a pure profit of $100,000. If all traders tried to cash in on the opportunity, however, their demand for euros in New York would drive up the dollar price of euros there, and their supply of euros in London would drive down the dollar price of euros there. Very quickly, the difference between the New York and London exchange rates would disappear. Since foreign exchange traders carefully watch their computer screens for arbitrage opportunities, the few that arise are small and very short-lived. While a foreign exchange transaction can match any two currencies, most transactions (87 percent in April 2013) are exchanges of foreign currencies for U.S. dollars. This is true even when a bank’s goal is to sell one nondollar currency and buy another! A bank wishing to sell Swiss francs and buy Israeli shekels, for example, will usually sell its francs for dollars and then use the dollars to buy shekels. While this procedure may appear roundabout, it is actually cheaper for the bank than the alternative of trying to find a holder of shekels who wishes to buy Swiss francs. The advantage of trading through the dollar is a result of the United States’ importance in the world economy. Because the volume of international transactions involving dollars is so great, it is not hard to find parties willing to trade dollars against Swiss francs or shekels. In contrast, relatively few transactions require direct exchanges of Swiss francs for shekels.3 Because of its pivotal role in so many foreign exchange deals, the U.S. dollar is sometimes called a vehicle currency. A vehicle currency is one that is widely used to denomi- nate international contracts made by parties who do not reside in the country that issues the vehicle currency. It has been suggested that the euro, which was introduced at the start of 1999, could evolve into a vehicle currency on a par with the dollar. By April 2013, about 33 percent of foreign exchange trades were against euros—less than half the share of the dollar, and significantly below the figure of 39 percent clocked three years earlier. Japan’s yen is the third most important currency, with a market share of 23 percent (out of 200, because two currencies are necessary for every foreign exchange trade). The pound sterling, once second only to the dollar as a key international currency, has declined greatly in importance.4

3The Swiss franc/shekel exchange rate can be calculated from the dollar/franc and dollar/shekel exchange rates as the dollar/shekel rate divided by the dollar/franc rate. If the dollar/franc rate is $0.80 per franc and the dollar/ shekel rate is $0.20 per shekel, then the Swiss franc/shekel rate is (0.20+ shekel) (0.80+ franc) = 0.25 Swiss francs/shekel. Exchange rates between nondollar currencies are called “cross rates” by foreign exchange traders. > 4For a more detailed discussion of vehicle currencies, see Richard Portes and Hélène Rey, “The Emergence of the Euro as an International Currency,” Economic Policy 26 (April 1998), pp. 307–343. Data on currency shares come from the Bank for International Settlements, op. cit., table 2. For an assessment of the future roles of the dollar and the euro, see the essays in Jean Pisani-Ferry and Adam S. Posen, eds., The Euro at Ten: The Next Global Currency? (Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2009). These essays were written before the euro area crisis, to be discussed in Chapter 21.

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Spot Rates and Forward Rates The foreign exchange transactions we have been discussing take place on the spot: Two parties agree to an exchange of bank deposits and execute the deal immediately. Exchange rates governing such “on-the-spot” trading are called spot exchange rates, and the deal is called a spot transaction. Foreign exchange deals sometimes specify a future transaction date—one that may be 30 days, 90 days, 180 days, or even several years away. The exchange rates quoted in such transactions are called forward exchange rates. In a 30-day forward transaction, for example, two parties may commit themselves on April 1 to a spot exchange of £100,000 for $155,000 on May 1. The 30-day forward exchange rate is therefore $1.55 per pound, and it is generally different from the spot rate and from the forward rates applied to different future dates. When you agree to sell pounds for dollars on a future date at a forward rate agreed on today, you have “sold pounds forward” and “bought dollars forward.” The future date on which the currencies are actually exchanged is called the value date.5 Table 14-1 shows forward exchange rates for some major currencies. Forward and spot exchange rates, while not necessarily equal, do move closely together, as illustrated for monthly data on dollar/pound rates in Figure 14-1.

Exchange rates ($/£) 2.2

Spot rate 2.0

1.8

1.6

1.4

Forward rate 1.2

1.0 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2016

FIGURE 14-1 Pearson MyLab Economics Real-time data Dollar/Pound Spot and Forward Exchange Rates, 1983–2016 Spot and forward exchange rates tend to move in a highly correlated fashion.

Source: Datastream. Rates shown are 90-day forward exchange rates and spot exchange rates, at end of month.

5In days past, it would take up to two days to settle even spot foreign exchange transactions. In other words, the value date for a spot transaction was actually two days after the deal was struck. Nowadays, most spot trades of major currencies settle on the same day.

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The appendix to this chapter, which discusses how forward exchange rates are determined, explains this close relationship between movements in spot and forward rates. An example shows why parties may wish to engage in forward exchange transactions. Suppose Radio Shack knows that in 30 days it must pay yen to a Japanese supplier for a shipment of radios arriving then. Radio Shack can sell each radio for $100 and must pay its supplier ¥9,000 per radio; its profit depends on the dollar/ yen exchange rate. At a spot exchange rate of $0.0105 per yen, Radio Shack would pay (+0.0105 per yen) * (¥9,000 per radio) = +94.50 per radio and would therefore make $5.50 on each radio imported. But Radio Shack will not have the funds to pay the supplier until the radios arrive and are sold. If over the next 30 days the dollar unexpectedly depreciates to $0.0115 per yen, Radio Shack will have to pay (+0.0115 per yen) * (¥9,000 per radio) = +103.50 per radio and so will take a $3.50 loss on each. To avoid this risk, Radio Shack can make a 30-day forward exchange deal with Bank of America. If Bank of America agrees to sell yen to Radio Shack in 30 days at a rate of $0.0107, Radio Shack is assured of paying exactly (+0.0107 per yen) * (¥9,000 per radio) = +96.30 per radio to the supplier. By buying yen and selling dollars forward, Radio Shack is guaranteed a profit of $3.70 per radio and is insured against the possibility that a sudden exchange rate change will turn a profitable importing deal into a loss. In the jargon of the foreign exchange market, we would say that Radio Shack has hedged its foreign currency risk. From now on, when we mention an exchange rate but don’t specify whether it is a spot rate or a forward rate, we will always be referring to the spot rate. Foreign Exchange Swaps A foreign exchange swap is a spot sale of a currency combined with a forward repur- chase of that currency. For example, suppose the Toyota auto company has just received $1 million from American sales and knows it will have to pay those dollars to a California supplier in three months. Toyota’s asset-management department would meanwhile like to invest the $1 million in euro bonds. A three-month swap of dollars into euros may result in lower brokers’ fees than the two separate transactions, possibly with different parties, of selling dollars for spot euros and selling the euros for dollars on the forward market. Swaps make up a significant proportion of all foreign exchange trading.

Futures and Options Several other financial instruments traded in the foreign exchange market, like forward contracts, involve future exchanges of currencies. The timing and terms of the exchanges can differ, however, from those specified in forward contracts, giving traders additional flexibility in avoiding foreign exchange risk. When you buy a futures contract, you buy a promise that a specified amount of foreign currency will be delivered on a specified date in the future. A forward contract between you and some other private party is an alternative way to ensure that you receive the same amount of foreign currency on the date in question. But while you have no choice about fulfilling your end of a forward deal, you can sell your futures contract on an organized futures exchange, realizing a profit or loss right away. Such a sale might appear advantageous, for example, if your views about the future spot exchange rate were to change. A foreign exchange option gives its owner the right to buy or sell a specified amount of foreign currency at a specified price at any time up to a specified expiration date. The other

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party to the deal, the option’s seller, is required to sell or buy the foreign currency at the discretion of the option’s owner, who is under no obligation to exercise his right.6 Imagine you are uncertain about when in the next month a foreign currency payment will arrive. To avoid the risk of a loss, you may wish to buy a put option giving you the right to sell the foreign currency at a known exchange rate at any time during the month. If instead you expect to make a payment abroad sometime in the month, a call option, which gives you the right to buy foreign currency to make the payment at a known price, might be attractive. Options can be written on many underlying assets (including foreign exchange futures), and, like futures, they are freely bought and sold. Forwards, swaps, futures, and options are all examples of financial derivatives, which we encountered in Chapter 13.

The Demand for Foreign Currency Assets We have now seen how banks, corporations, and other institutions trade foreign currency bank deposits in a worldwide foreign exchange market that operates 24 hours a day. To understand how exchange rates are determined by the foreign exchange market, we first must ask how the major actors’ demands for different types of foreign currency deposits are determined. The demand for a foreign currency bank deposit is influenced by the same considerations that influence the demand for any other asset. Chief among these considerations is our view of what the deposit will be worth in the future. A foreign currency deposit’s future value depends in turn on two factors: the interest rate it offers and the expected change in the currency’s exchange rate against other currencies.

Assets and Asset Returns As you will recall, people can hold wealth in many forms—stocks, bonds, cash, real estate, rare wines, diamonds, and so on. The object of acquiring wealth—of saving—is to transfer purchasing power into the future. We may do this to provide for our retire- ment years, for our heirs, or simply because we earn more than we need to spend in a particular year and prefer to save the balance for a rainy day.

Defining Asset Returns Because the object of saving is to provide for future consumption, we judge the desirability of an asset largely on the basis of its rate of return, that is, the percentage increase in value it offers over some time period. For example, suppose that at the beginning of 2015 you pay $100 for a share of stock issued by Financial Soothsayers, Inc. If the stock pays you a dividend of $1 at the beginning of 2016, and if the stock’s price rises from $100 to $109 per share over the year, then you have earned a rate of return of 10 percent on the stock over 2015—that is, your initial $100 investment has grown in value to $110, the sum of the $1 dividend and the $109 you could get by selling your share. Had Financial Soothsayers stock still paid out its $1 dividend but dropped in price to $89 per share, your $100 investment would be worth only $90 by year’s end, giving a rate of return of negative 10 percent. You often cannot know with certainty the return that an asset will actually pay after you buy it. Both the dividend paid by a share of stock and the share’s resale price, for example, may be hard to predict. Your decision therefore must be based on an expected

6This description refers to a so-called American option, as opposed to a European option that can only be exercised on a predetermined date.

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rate of return. To calculate an expected rate of return over some time period, you make your best forecast of the asset’s total value at the period’s end. The percentage difference between that expected future value and the price you pay for the asset today equals the asset’s expected rate of return over the time period. When we measure an asset’s rate of return, we compare how an investment in the asset changes in total value between two dates. In the previous example, we compared how the value of an investment in Financial Soothsayers stock changed between 2015 ($100) and 2016 ($110) to conclude that the rate of return on the stock was 10 percent per year. We call this a dollar rate of return because the two values we compare are expressed in terms of dollars. It is also possible, however, to compute different rates of return by expressing the two values in terms of a foreign currency or a commodity such as gold.

The Real Rate of Return The expected rate of return that savers consider in deciding which assets to hold is the expected real rate of return, that is, the rate of return com- puted by measuring asset values in terms of some broad representative basket of products that savers regularly purchase. It is the expected real return that matters because the ultimate goal of saving is future consumption, and only the real return measures the goods and services a saver can buy in the future in return for giving up some consumption (that is, saving) today.

OFFSHORE CURRENCY MARKETS: THE CASE OF THE CHINESE YUAN

he Chinese economy, the world’s most popu- RMB as a settlement and reserve currency. To Tlous, has been growing rapidly for at least further its goal of internalizing the RMB, China’ s 25 years now, and developments there are increas- government since 2009 has allowed RMB to be ingly important for global trade and financial mar- paid to people outside of mainland China— kets. Although China’s GDP, measured in dollars, starting with Hong Kong—provided they earn is second in size only to that of the United States, those RMB through exports to China and China’s currency, the yuan renminbi (“renminbi,” use them only to pay for imports from China. abbreviated as RMB, means “the people’s money”) Because offshore holders of RMB can trade them is not yet as important in international transactions with each other, this new freedom has created a as China’s economic size would suggest. Currently, market for the of fshore RMB, usually denoted the RMB ranks ninth among currencies most used by the symbol CNH, as opposed to the symbol globally for foreign exchange trading, according to CNY that denotes the onshore RMB. The daily the Bank for International Settlements.7 turnover in the spot CNY market in April 2013 In the past, the Chinese government imposed was $17.6 billion while the corresponding figure strict restrictions on cross-border RMB pay- for CNH was $12.8 billion, with $5.1 billion of ments to settle international trade transactions. these traded in Hong Kong, and the rest in cen- As a result, the RMB could be traded only within ters such as Singapore, Taipei, and London.8 the borders of mainland China. This limitation China restricts the offshore use of RMB to pur- contradicted another goal of the Chinese gov- poses of international trade, as opposed to financial ernment, promoting the international use of the transactions, to prevent investors from moving

7See the “Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange and Derivatives Market Activity in 2013,” Bank for International Settlements, Basel, Switzerland, February 2014. 8See Chang Shu, Dong He, and Xiaoqiang Cheng, “One Currency, Two Markets: The Renminbi’s Growing Influence in Asia-Pacific,” Bank for International Settlements Working Paper 446, April 2014.

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6.9

6.8

6.7

6.6 CNH 6.5 CNY

6.4

Yuan per U.S. Dollar 6.3

6.2

6.1

6.0

08/23/1010/23/1012/23/1002/23/1104/23/1106/23/1108/23/1110/23/1112/23/1102/23/1204/23/1206/23/1208/23/1210/23/1212/23/1202/23/1304/23/1306/23/1308/23/1310/23/1312/23/1302/23/1404/23/1406/23/1408/23/1410/23/1412/23/1402/23/1504/23/1506/23/1508/23/1510/23/1512/23/1502/23/1604/23/16

Source: Bloomberg Terminal.

funds into mainland markets to take advantage of CNY depreciation scare, but it was eliminated arbitrage opportunities or differences in the expected abruptly when the PBC intervened through state- returns on CNY and foreign currency assets. China owned banks in Hong Kong to buy offshore RMB. also limits movements of domestic funds into for- The development of offshore markets encour- eign assets. Because conditions in the onshore and ages the use of a currency outside its home coun- offshore markets can be different—in particular, the try. Offshore currency trading can arise even in CNH floats while the CNY rate against the dollar is the absence of financial-account controls, but heavily controlled by the People’s Bank of China regulations of various kinds often provide incen- (PBC)—the absence of exchange rate arbitrage tives for the initial development of an offshore means that the CNY and CNH rates can differ, and market, as was even true for the now extensive off- they frequently do, as the chart above shows.9 shore market in U.S. dollars (see Chapter 20). The One of the most recent notable divergences development of the RMB offshore market and its between the two rates emerged after an unexpected rapid growth likely herald a faster evolution of 3 percent rise in the CNY price of the U.S. dollar the RMB into a truly international currency. But in August 2015, which occurred over just two days. for this evolution to be complete, China will first Immediately after this surprise, offshore traders fear- need to ease much further its controls over cross- ing further CNY depreciation sold offshore RMB, border financial transactions. That development the dollar price of which fell sharply. Another big would guarantee the equality of CNY and CNH divergence appeared in January of 2016 after another exchange rates.

9The PBC enforces financial-account restrictions so that it can control the value of the CNY rate indepen- dently of foreign financial conditions. Without such controls, as we will see later in this chapter, the value of the CNY would depend on foreign financial conditions. Because offshore investors can freely trade CNH deposits with each other, however, the CNH rate does depend on foreign financial conditions: It is determined by a foreign exchange market equilibrium condition like the one we explain shortly.

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To continue our example, suppose the dollar value of an investment in Financial Soothsayers stock increases by 10 percent between 2015 and 2016 but the dollar prices of all goods and services also increase by 10 percent. Then in terms of output—that is, in real terms—the investment would be worth no more in 2015 than in 2016. With a real rate of return of zero, Financial Soothsayers stock would not be a very desirable asset (because in the real world assets with positive real rates of return usually are available). Although savers care about expected real rates of return, rates of return expressed in terms of a currency can still be used to compare real returns on different assets. Even if all dollar prices rise by 10 percent between 2015 and 2016, a rare bottle of wine whose dollar price rises by 25 percent is still a better investment than a bond whose dollar value rises by 20 percent. The real rate of return offered by the wine is 15 percent (= 25 percent - 10 percent), while that offered by the bond is only 10 percent (= 20 percent - 10 percent). Notice that the difference between the dollar returns of the two assets (25 percent - 20 percent) must equal the difference between their real returns (15 percent - 10 percent). The reason for this equality is that given the two assets’ dollar returns, a change in the rate at which the dollar prices of goods are rising changes both assets’ real returns by the same amount. The distinction between real rates of return and dollar rates of return illustrates an important concept in studying how savers evaluate different assets: The returns on two assets cannot be compared unless they are measured in the same units. For example, it makes no sense to compare directly the real return on the bottle of wine (15 percent in our example) with the dollar return on the bond (20 percent) or to compare the dollar return on old paintings with the euro return on gold. Only after the returns are expressed in terms of a common unit of measure—for example, all in terms of dollars—can we tell which asset offers the highest expected real rate of return.

Risk and Liquidity All else equal, individuals prefer to hold those assets offering the highest expected real rate of return. Our later discussions of particular assets will show, however, that “all else” often is not equal. Some assets may be valued by savers for attributes other than the expected real rate of return they offer. Savers care about two main characteristics of an asset other than its return: its risk, the variability it contributes to savers’ wealth, and its liquidity, the ease with which the asset can be sold or exchanged for goods. 1. Risk. An asset’s real return is usually unpredictable and may turn out to be quite different from what savers expected when they purchased the asset. In our last example, savers found the expected real rate of return on an investment in bonds (10 percent) by subtracting from the expected rate of increase in the investment’s dollar value (20 percent) the expected rate of increase in dollar prices (10 percent). But if expectations are wrong and the bonds’ dollar value stays constant instead of rising by 20 percent, the saver ends up with a real return of negative 10 percent (= 0 percent - 10 percent). Savers dislike uncertainty and are reluctant to hold assets that make their wealth highly variable. An asset with a high expected rate of return may thus appear unde- sirable to savers if its realized rate of return fluctuates widely. 2. Liquidity. Assets also differ according to the cost and speed at which savers can dispose of them. A house, for example, is not very liquid because its sale usually requires time and the services of brokers and inspectors. To sell a house quickly, one might have to sell at a relatively low price. In contrast, cash is the most liquid of all assets: It is always acceptable at face value as payment for goods or other assets. Savers prefer to hold some liquid assets as a precaution against unexpected

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pressing expenses that might force them to sell less-liquid assets at a loss. They will therefore consider an asset’s liquidity as well as its expected return and risk in deciding how much of it to hold.

Interest Rates As in other asset markets, participants in the foreign exchange market base their demands for deposits of different currencies on a comparison of these assets’ expected rates of return. To compare returns on different deposits, market participants need two pieces of information. First, they need to know how the money values of the deposits will change. Second, they need to know how exchange rates will change so that they can translate rates of return measured in different currencies into comparable terms. The first piece of information needed to compute the rate of return on a deposit of a particular currency is the currency’s interest rate, the amount of that currency an individual can earn by lending a unit of the currency for a year. At a dollar interest rate of 0.10 (quoted as 10 percent per year), the lender of $1 receives $1.10 at the end of the year, $1 of which is principal and 10 cents of which is interest. Looked at from the other side of the transaction, the interest rate on dollars is also the amount that must be paid to borrow $1 for a year. When you buy a U.S. Treasury bill, you earn the interest rate on dollars because you are lending dollars to the U.S. government. Interest rates play an important role in the foreign exchange market because the large deposits traded there pay interest, each at a rate reflecting its currency of denomination. For example, when the interest rate on dollars is 10 percent per year, a $100,000 deposit is worth $110,000 after a year; when the interest rate on euros is 5 percent per year, a €100,000 deposit is worth €105,000 after a year. Deposits pay interest because they are really loans from the depositor to the bank. When a corporation or a financial institution deposits a currency in a bank, it is lending that currency to the bank rather than using it for some current expenditure. In other words, the depositor is acquiring an asset denominated in the currency it deposits. The dollar interest rate is simply the dollar rate of return on dollar deposits. You “buy” the deposit by lending a bank $100,000, and when you are paid back with 10 percent interest at the end of the year, your asset is worth $110,000. This gives a rate of return of (110,000 - 100,000) 100,000 = 0.10, or 10 percent per year. Similarly, a foreign currency’s interest rate measures the foreign currency return on deposits of that currency. Figure 14-2 shows >the monthly behavior of interest rates on the dollar and the Japanese yen from 1978 to 2016. These interest rates are not measured in comparable terms, so there is no reason for them to be close to each other or to move in similar ways over time.

Exchange Rates and Asset Returns The interest rates offered by a dollar and a euro deposit tell us how their dollar and euro values will change over a year. The other piece of information we need in order to compare the rates of return offered by dollar and euro deposits is the expected change in the dollar/euro exchange rate over the year. To see which deposit, euro or dollar, offers a higher expected rate of return, you must ask the question: If I use dollars to buy a euro deposit, how many dollars will I get back after a year? When you answer this question, you are calculating the dollar rate of return on a euro deposit because you are comparing its dollar price today with its dollar value a year from today. To see how to approach this type of calculation, let’s look at the following situation: Suppose that today’s exchange rate (quoted in American terms) is $1.10 per euro, but

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Dollar rate

4 Yen rate

–1 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 20122014 2016

FIGURE 14-2 Interest Rates on Dollar and Yen Deposits, 1978–2016 Since dollar and yen interest rates are not measured in comparable terms, they can move quite differently over time.

Source: Datastream. Three-month interest rates are shown.

that you expect the rate to be $1.165 per euro in a year (perhaps because you expect unfavorable developments in the U.S. economy). Suppose also that the dollar interest rate is 10 percent per year while the euro interest rate is 5 percent per year. This means a deposit of $1.00 pays $1.10 after a year while a deposit of €1 pays €1.05 after a year. Which of these deposits offers the higher return? The answer can be found in five steps. Step 1. Use today’s dollar/euro exchange rate to figure out the dollar price of a euro deposit of, say, €1. If the exchange rate today is $1.10 per euro, the dollar price of a €1 deposit is just $1.10. Step 2. Use the euro interest rate to find the amount of euros you will have a year from now if you purchase a €1 deposit today. You know that the interest rate on euro deposits is 5 percent per year. So at the end of a year, your €1 deposit will be worth €1.05. Step 3. Use the exchange rate you expect to prevail a year from today to calculate the expected dollar value of the euro amount determined in Step 2. Since you expect the dollar to depreciate against the euro over the coming year so that the exchange rate 12 months from today is $1.165 per euro, you expect the dollar value of your euro deposit after a year to be +1.165 per euro * :1.05 = +1.223. Step 4. Now that you know the dollar price of a €1 deposit today ($1.10) and can forecast its value in a year ($1.223), you can calculate the expected dollar rate of return on a euro deposit as (1.223 - 1.10) 1.10 = 0.11, or 11 percent per year. >

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Step 5. Since the dollar rate of return on dollar deposits (the dollar interest rate) is only 10 percent per year, you expect to do better by holding your wealth in the form of euro deposits. Despite the fact that the dollar interest rate exceeds the euro interest rate by 5 percent per year, the euro’s expected appreciation against the dollar gives euro holders a prospective capital gain that is large enough to make euro deposits the higher-yield asset.

A Simple Rule A simple rule shortens this calculation. First, define the rate of depreciation of the dollar against the euro as the percentage increase in the dollar/euro exchange rate over a year. In the last example, the dollar’s expected depreciation rate is (1.165 - 1.10) 1.10 = 0.059, or roughly 6 percent per year. Once you have calculated the rate of depreciation of the dollar against the euro, our rule is this: The dollar rate of return on euro> deposits is approximately the euro interest rate plus the rate of depreciation of the dollar against the euro. In other words, to translate the euro return on euro deposits into dollar terms, you need to add the rate at which the euro’s dollar price rises over a year to the euro interest rate. In our example, the sum of the euro interest rate (5 percent) and the expected depreciation rate of the dollar (roughly 6 percent) is about 11 percent, which is what we found to be the expected dollar return on euro deposits in our first calculation. We summarize our discussion by introducing some notation:

R: = today>s interest rate on one@year euro deposits,

E+/: = today>s dollar/euro exchange rate (number of dollars per euro), e E+/: = dollar/euro exchange rate (number of dollars per euro) expected to prevail a year from today. (The superscript e attached to this last exchange rate indicates that it is a forecast of the future exchange rate based on what people know today.) Using these symbols, we write the expected rate of return on a euro deposit, measured in terms of dollars, as the sum of (1) the euro interest rate and (2) the expected rate of dollar depreciation against the euro: e R: + (E+ : - E+ :) E+ :. This expected return is what must >be compared> > >with the interest rate on one- year dollar deposits, R+, in deciding whether dollar or euro deposits offer the higher expected rate of return.10 The expected rate of return difference between dollar and euro deposits is therefore equal to R+ less the previous expression,

e e R+ - [R: + (E+ : - E+ :) E+ :] = R+ - R: - (E+ : - E+ :) E+ :. (14-1) When the difference above> is positive,> > > dollar deposits yield the> higher> expected> > rate of return; when it is negative, euro deposits yield the higher expected rate of return.

10 If you compute the expected dollar return on euro deposits using the exact five-step method we described before introducing the simple rule, you’ll find that it actually equals e (1 + R:)(E+ : E+ :) - 1. This exact formula can be rewritten, however, as > > > e e R: + (E+ : - E+ :) E+ : + R: * (E+ : - E+ :) E+ :. The expression above is very close >to the formula> > > derived from the> simple> rule> when,> as is usually the case, e the product R: * (E+ : - E+ :) E+ : is a small number. > > > >

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TABLE 14-3 Comparing Dollar Rates of Return on Dollar and Euro Deposits Expected Rate Rate of Return Dollar Euro of Dollar Depreciation Difference between Interest Rate Interest Rate against Euro Dollar and Euro Deposits

e E+ : - E+ : (E+ : - E+ :) R+ - R: - > > > > Case R+ R: E+ : E+ : 1 0.10 0.06 0.00> 0.04 > 2 0.10 0.06 0.04 0.00 3 0.10 0.06 0.08 -0.04 4 0.10 0.12 -0.04 0.02

Table 14-3 carries out some illustrative comparisons. In case 1, the interest difference in favor of dollar deposits is 4 percent per year (R+ - R: = 0.10 - 0.06 = 0.04), and e no change in the exchange rate is expected [(E+ : - E+ :) E+ : = 0.00]. This means that the expected annual real rate of return on dollar> deposits> is> 4 percent higher than that on euro deposits, so that, other things equal, you would> prefer to hold your wealth as dollar rather than euro deposits. In case 2, the interest difference is the same (4 percent), but it is just offset by an expected depreciation rate of the dollar of 4 percent. The two assets therefore have the same expected rate of return. Case 3 is similar to the one discussed earlier: A 4 percent interest difference in favor of dollar deposits is more than offset by an 8 percent expected depreciation of the dollar, so euro deposits are preferred by market participants. In case 4, there is a 2 percent interest difference in favor of euro deposits, but the dollar is expected to appreciate against the euro by 4 percent over the year. The expected rate of return on dollar deposits is therefore 2 percent per year higher than that on euro deposits. So far, we have been translating all returns into dollar terms. But the rate of return differentials we calculated would have been the same had we chosen to express returns in terms of euros or in terms of some third currency. Suppose, for example, we wanted to measure the return on dollar deposits in terms of euros. Following our simple rule, we would add to the dollar interest rate R+ the expected rate of depreciation of the euro against the dollar. But the expected rate of depreciation of the euro against the dollar is approximately the expected rate of appreciation of the dollar against the euro, that is, the expected rate of depreciation of the dollar against the euro with a minus sign in front of it. This means that in terms of euros, the return on a dollar deposit is

e R+ - (E+ : - E+ :) E+ :. > > > > The difference between the expression above and R+ is identical to expression (14-1). Thus, it makes no difference to our comparison whether we measure returns in terms of dollars or euros, as long as we measure them both in terms of the same currency.

Return, Risk, and Liquidity in the Foreign Exchange Market We observed earlier that a saver deciding which assets to hold may care about the assets’ riskiness and liquidity in addition to their expected real rates of return. Similarly, the demand for foreign currency assets depends not only on returns but also on risk and liquidity. Even if the expected dollar return on euro deposits is higher than that on

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dollar deposits, for example, people may be reluctant to hold euro deposits if the payoff to holding them varies erratically. There is no consensus among economists about the importance of risk in the foreign exchange market. Even the definition of “foreign exchange risk” is a topic of debate. For now, we will avoid these complex questions by assuming that the real returns on all deposits have equal riskiness, regardless of the currency of denomination. In other words, we are assuming that risk differences do not influence the demand for foreign currency assets. We discuss the role of foreign exchange risk in greater detail, however, in Chapter 18.11 Some market participants may be influenced by liquidity factors in deciding which currencies to hold. Most of these participants are firms and individuals conducting international trade. An American importer of French fashion products or wines, for example, may find it convenient to hold euros for routine payments even if the expected rate of return on euros is lower than that on dollars. Because payments connected with international trade make up a very small fraction of total foreign exchange transactions, we ignore the liquidity motive for holding foreign currencies. We are therefore assuming for now that participants in the foreign exchange market base their demands for foreign currency assets exclusively on a comparison of those assets’ expected rates of return. The main reason for making this assumption is that it simplifies our analysis of how exchange rates are determined in the foreign exchange market. In addition, the risk and liquidity motives for holding foreign currencies appear to be of secondary importance for many of the international macroeconomic issues discussed in the next few chapters.

Equilibrium in the Foreign Exchange Market We now use what we have learned about the demand for foreign currency assets to describe how exchange rates are determined. We will show that the exchange rate at which the market settles is the one that makes market participants content to hold existing supplies of deposits of all currencies. When market participants willingly hold the existing supplies of deposits of all currencies, we say that the foreign exchange market is in equilibrium. The description of exchange rate determination given in this section is only a first step: A full explanation of the exchange rate’s current level can be given only after we examine how participants in the foreign exchange market form their expectations about the exchange rates they expect to prevail in the future. The next two chapters look at the factors that influence expectations of future exchange rates. For now, however, we will take expected future exchange rates as given.

Interest Parity: The Basic Equilibrium Condition The foreign exchange market is in equilibrium when deposits of all currencies offer the same expected rate of return. The condition that the expected returns on deposits of any two currencies are equal when measured in the same currency is called the

11In discussing spot and forward foreign exchange transactions, some textbooks make a distinction between foreign exchange “speculators”—market participants who allegedly care only about expected returns—and “hedgers”—market participants whose concern is to avoid risk. We depart from this textbook tradition because it can mislead the unwary: While the speculative and hedging motives are both potentially important in exchange rate determination, the same person can be both a speculator and a hedger if she cares about both return and risk. Our tentative assumption that risk is unimportant in determining the demand for foreign currency assets means, in terms of the traditional language, that the speculative motive for holding foreign currencies is far more important than the hedging motive.

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interest parity condition. It implies that potential holders of foreign currency deposits view them all as equally desirable assets, provided their expected rates of return are the same. Let’s see why the foreign exchange market is in equilibrium only when the interest parity condition holds. Suppose the dollar interest rate is 10 percent and the euro interest rate is 6 percent, but that the dollar is expected to depreciate against the euro at an 8 percent rate over a year. (This is case 3 in Table 14-3.) In the circumstances described, the expected rate of return on euro deposits would be 4 percent per year higher than that on dollar deposits. We assumed at the end of the last section that individuals always prefer to hold deposits of currencies offering the highest expected return. This implies that if the expected return on euro deposits is 4 percent greater than that on dollar deposits, no one will be willing to continue holding dollar deposits, and holders of dollar deposits will be trying to sell them for euro deposits. There will therefore be an excess supply of dollar deposits and an excess demand for euro deposits in the foreign exchange market. As a contrasting example, suppose dollar deposits again offer a 10 percent interest rate but euro deposits offer a 12 percent rate and the dollar is expected to appreciate against the euro by 4 percent over the coming year. (This is case 4 in Table 14-3.) Now the return on dollar deposits is 2 percent higher. In this case, no one would demand euro deposits, so they would be in excess supply and dollar deposits would be in excess demand. When, however, the dollar interest rate is 10 percent, the euro interest rate is 6 percent, and the dollar’s expected depreciation rate against the euro is 4 percent, dollar and euro deposits offer the same rate of return and participants in the foreign exchange market are equally willing to hold either. (This is case 2 in Table 14-3.) Only when all expected rates of return are equal—that is, when the interest parity condition holds—is there no excess supply of some type of deposit and no excess demand for another. The foreign exchange market is in equilibrium when no type of deposit is in excess demand or excess supply. We can therefore say that the foreign exchange market is in equilibrium when, and only when, the interest parity condition holds. To represent interest parity between dollar and euro deposits symbolically, we use expression (14-1), which shows the difference between the two assets’ expected rates of return measured in dollars. The expected rates of return are equal when

e R+ = R: + (E+ : - E+ :) E+ :. (14-2) > > > > You probably suspect that when dollar deposits offer a higher return than euro deposits, the dollar will appreciate against the euro as investors all try to shift their funds into dollars. Conversely, the dollar should depreciate against the euro when it is euro deposits that initially offer the higher return. This intuition is exactly correct. To understand the mechanism at work, however, we must take a careful look at how exchange rate changes like these help to maintain equilibrium in the foreign exchange market.

How Changes in the Current Exchange Rate Affect Expected Returns As a first step in understanding how the foreign exchange market finds its equilibrium, we examine how changes in today’s exchange rate affect the expected return on a foreign currency deposit when interest rates and expectations about the future exchange rate do not change. Our analysis will show that, other things equal, depreciation of a country’s currency today lowers the expected domestic currency return on foreign currency deposits. Conversely, appreciation of the domestic currency today, all else equal, raises the domestic currency return expected of foreign currency deposits.

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It is easiest to see why these relationships hold by looking at an example: How does a change in today’s dollar/euro exchange rate, all else held constant, change the expected return, measured in terms of dollars, on euro deposits? Suppose today’s dollar/euro rate is $1.00 per euro and the exchange rate you expect for this day next year is $1.05 per euro. Then the expected rate of dollar depreciation against the euro is (1.05 - 1.00) 1.00 = 0.05, or 5 percent per year. This means that when you buy a euro deposit, you not only earn the interest R: but also get a 5 percent “bonus” in terms of dollars. Now> suppose today’s exchange rate suddenly jumps up to $1.03 per euro (a depreciation of the dollar and an appreciation of the euro), but the expected future rate is still $1.05 per euro. What happens to the “bonus” you expected to get from the euro’s increase in value in terms of dollars? The expected rate of dollar depreciation is now only (1.05 - 1.03) 1.03 = 0.019, or 1.9 percent instead of 5 percent. Since R: has not changed, the dollar return on euro deposits, which is the sum of R: and the expected rate of dollar> depreciation, has fallen by 3.1 percentage points per year (5 percent - 1.9 percent). In Table 14-4, we work out the dollar return on euro deposits for various levels of today’s dollar/euro exchange rate E+ :, always assuming that the expected future exchange rate remains fixed at $1.05 per euro> and the euro interest rate is 5 percent per year. As you can see, a rise in today’s dollar/euro exchange rate (a depreciation of the dollar against the euro) always lowers the expected dollar return on euro deposits (as in our example), while a fall in today’s dollar/euro exchange rate (an appreciation of the dollar against the euro) always raises this return. It may run counter to your intuition that a depreciation of the dollar against the euro makes euro deposits less attractive relative to dollar deposits (by lowering the expected dollar return on euro deposits) while an appreciation of the dollar makes euro deposits more attractive. This result will seem less surprising if you remember we have assumed that the expected future dollar/euro rate and interest rates do not change. A dollar depreciation today, for example, means the dollar now needs to depreciate by a smaller amount to reach any given expected future level. If the expected future dollar/euro exchange rate does not change when the dollar depreciates today, the dollar’s expected future depreciation against the euro therefore falls, or, alternatively, the dollar’s expected future appreciation rises. Since interest rates also are unchanged, today’s dollar depreciation thus makes euro deposits less attractive compared with dollar deposits.

TABLE 14-4 Today’s Dollar/Euro Exchange Rate and the Expected Dollar Return e = on Euro Deposits When E+ : +1.05 per Euro > Expected Dollar Expected Dollar Today’s Dollar/Euro Interest Rate on Depreciation Rate Return on Euro Exchange Rate Euro Deposits against Euro Deposits

1.05 - E+ : 1.05 - E+ : R: + E+ : R: E+ : > E+ : > 1.07> 0.05 -0.019> 0.031 > 1.05 0.05 0.00 0.05 1.03 0.05 0.019 0.069 1.02 0.05 0.029 0.079 1.00 0.05 0.05 0.10

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Put another way, a current dollar depreciation that affects neither exchange rate expectations nor interest rates leaves the expected future dollar payoff of a euro deposit the same but raises the deposit’s current dollar cost. This change naturally makes euro deposits less attractive relative to dollar deposits. It may also run counter to your intuition that today’s exchange rate can change while the exchange rate expected for the future does not. We will indeed study cases later in this book when both of these rates do change at once. We nonetheless hold the expected future exchange rate constant in the present discussion because that is the clearest way to illustrate the effect of today’s exchange rate on expected returns. If it helps, you can imagine we are looking at the impact of a temporary change so brief that it has no effect on the exchange rate expected for next year. Figure 14-3 shows the calculations in Table 14-4 in a graphic form that will be helpful in our analysis of exchange rate determination. The vertical axis in the figure measures today’s dollar/euro exchange rate and the horizontal axis measures the expected dollar return on euro deposits. For fixed values of the expected future dollar/euro exchange rate and the euro interest rate, the relation between today’s dollar/euro exchange rate and the expected dollar return on euro deposits defines a downward-sloping schedule.

The Equilibrium Exchange Rate Now that we understand why the interest parity condition must hold for the foreign exchange market to be in equilibrium and how today’s exchange rate affects the expected return on foreign currency deposits, we can see how equilibrium exchange

FIGURE 14-3 Today’s dollar/euro exchange rate, E The Relation between the $/: Current Dollar/Euro Exchange Rate and the Expected Dollar Return on Euro Deposits 1.07 e Given that E + : = 1.05 and R: = 0.05, an> appreciation of the dollar against the euro raises the expected return on euro deposits, 1.05 measured in terms of dollars.

1.03

1.02

1.00

0.031 0.050 0.069 0.079 0.100

Expected dollar return on Ee – E euro deposits, R + $/: $/: : E $/:

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FIGURE 14-4 Exchange rate, E Determination of the Equilibrium $/: Dollar/Euro Exchange Rate Return on Equilibrium in the foreign exchange dollar deposits market is at point 1, where the expected dollar returns on dollar and euro deposits are equal.

2 E 2 $/:

1 E 1 $/:

3 E 3 $/:

Expected return on euro deposits

R$ Rates of return (in dollar terms)

rates are determined. Our main conclusion will be that exchange rates always adjust to maintain interest parity. We continue to assume the dollar interest rate R+, the euro e interest rate R:, and the expected future dollar/euro exchange rate E+ : are all given. Figure 14-4 illustrates how the equilibrium dollar/euro exchange rate> is determined under these assumptions. The vertical schedule in the graph indicates the given level of R+, the return on dollar deposits measured in terms of dollars. The downward-sloping schedule shows how the expected return on euro deposits, measured in terms of dollars, depends on the current dollar/euro exchange rate. This second schedule is derived in the same way as the one shown in Figure 14-3. The equilibrium dollar/euro rate is the one indicated by the intersection of the two 1 schedules at point 1, E+ :. At this exchange rate, the returns on dollar and euro deposits are equal, so that the interest> parity condition (14-2), e 1 1 R+ = R: + (E+ : - E+ :) E+ :, is satisfied. > > > > Let’s see why the exchange rate will tend to settle at point 1 in Figure 14-4 if it is initially at a point such as 2 or 3. Suppose first that we are at point 2, with the exchange 2 rate equal to E+ :. The downward-sloping schedule measuring the expected dollar 2 return on euro deposits> tells us that at the exchange rate E+ :, the rate of return on euro deposits is less than the rate of return on dollar deposits, R> +. In this situation, anyone holding euro deposits wishes to sell them for the more lucrative dollar deposits: The foreign exchange market is out of equilibrium because participants such as banks and multinational corporations are unwilling to hold euro deposits. How does the exchange rate adjust? The unhappy owners of euro deposits attempt to sell them for dollar deposits, but because the return on dollar deposits is higher than 2 that on euro deposits at the exchange rate E+ :, no holder of a dollar deposit is willing to sell it for a euro deposit at that rate. As >euro holders try to entice dollar holders

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to trade by offering them a better price for dollars, the dollar/euro exchange rate falls 1 toward E+ :; that is, euros become cheaper in terms of dollars. Once the exchange rate 1 reaches E+> :, euro and dollar deposits offer equal returns, and holders of euro deposits no longer have> an incentive to try to sell them for dollars. The foreign exchange market 2 1 is therefore in equilibrium. In falling from E+ : to E+ :, the exchange rate equalizes the expected returns on the two types of deposit >by increasing> the rate at which the dollar is expected to depreciate in the future, thereby making euro deposits more attractive. The same process works in reverse if we are initially at point 3 with an exchange rate 3 of E+ :. At point 3, the return on euro deposits exceeds that on dollar deposits, so there is now an> excess supply of the latter. As unwilling holders of dollar deposits bid for the more attractive euro deposits, the price of euros in terms of dollars tends to rise; that is, the dol- 1 lar tends to depreciate against the euro. When the exchange rate has moved to E+ :, rates of return are equalized across currencies and the market is in equilibrium. The deprecia> - 3 1 tion of the dollar from E+ : to E+ : makes euro deposits less attractive relative to dollar 12 deposits by reducing the rate> at which> the dollar is expected to depreciate in the future. Interest Rates, Expectations, and Equilibrium Having seen how exchange rates are determined by interest parity, we now take a look at how current exchange rates are affected by changes in interest rates and in expectations about the future, the two factors we held constant in our previous discussions. We will see that the exchange rate (which is the relative price of two assets) responds to factors that alter the expected rates of return on those two assets.

The Effect of Changing Interest Rates on the Current Exchange Rate We often read in the newspaper that the dollar is strong because U.S. interest rates are high or that it is falling because U.S. interest rates are falling. Can these statements be explained using our analysis of the foreign exchange market? To answer this question, we again turn to a diagram. Figure 14-5 shows a rise in the 1 2 interest rate on dollars, from R+ to R+ as a rightward shift of the vertical dollar deposits 1 return schedule. At the initial exchange rate E+ :, the expected return on dollar deposits is now higher than that on euro deposits by an amount> equal to the distance between points 2 1 and 1′. As we have seen, this difference causes the dollar to appreciate to E+ : (point 2). Because there has been no change in the euro interest rate or in the expected> future exchange rate, the dollar’s appreciation today raises the expected dollar return on euro deposits by increasing the rate at which the dollar is expected to depreciate in the future. Figure 14-6 shows the effect of a rise in the euro interest rate R:. This change causes the downward-sloping schedule (which measures the expected dollar return on euro deposits) to shift rightward. (To see why, ask yourself how a rise in the euro interest rate alters the dollar return on euro deposits, given the current exchange rate and the expected future rate.) 1 At the initial exchange rate E+ :, the expected depreciation rate of the dollar is the same as before the rise in R:, so the> expected return on euro deposits now exceeds that 1 2 on dollar deposits. The dollar/euro exchange rate rises (from E+ : to E+ :) to eliminate the excess supply of dollar assets at point 1. As before, the dollar’s> depreciation> against the euro eliminates the excess supply of dollar assets by lowering the expected dollar

12We could have developed our diagram from the perspective of Europe, with the euro/dollar exchange rate E:/+(= 1 E+ :) on the vertical axis, a schedule vertical at R: to indicate the euro return on euro deposits, and a downward-sloping schedule showing how the euro return on dollar deposits varies with E +. An exercise > > : at the end of the chapter asks you to show that this alternative way of looking at equilibrium> in the foreign exchange market gives the same answers as the method used here in the text.

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FIGURE 14-5 Exchange rate, Effect of a Rise in the Dollar E $/: Interest Rate Dollar return A rise in the interest rate offered by dollar 1 2 deposits from Rs to Rs causes the dollar 1 2 to appreciate from E +/: (point 1) to E +/: (point 2).

11' E 1 $/:

2 E 2 $/:

Expected euro return

1 2 R$ R$ Rates of return (in dollar terms)

FIGURE 14-6 Exchange rate, Effect of a Rise in the Euro E $/: Interest Rate Dollar return A rise in the interest rate paid by euro deposits causes the dollar to 1 2 depreciate from E + (point 1) to E + : : Rise in euro (point 2). (This figure> also describes> interest rate the effect of a rise in the expected future $/€ exchange rate.)

2 E 2 $/:

1 E 1 Expected $/: euro return

R Rates of return $ (in dollar terms)

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rate of return on euro deposits. A rise in European interest rates therefore leads to a depreciation of the dollar against the euro or, looked at from the European perspective, an appreciation of the euro against the dollar. Our discussion shows that, all else equal, an increase in the interest paid on deposits of a currency causes that currency to appreciate against foreign currencies. Before we conclude that the newspaper account of the effect of interest rates on exchange rates is correct, we must remember that our assumption of a constant expected future exchange rate often is unrealistic. In many cases, a change in interest rates will be accompanied by a change in the expected future exchange rate. This change in the expected future exchange rate will depend, in turn, on the economic causes of the interest rate change. We compare different possible relationships between interest rates and expected future exchange rates in Chapter 16. Keep in mind for now that in the real world, we cannot predict how a given interest rate change will alter exchange rates unless we know why the interest rate is changing.

The Effect of Changing Expectations on the Current Exchange Rate Figure 14-6 may also be used to study the effect on today’s exchange rate of a rise in e the expected future dollar/euro exchange rate, E+ :. Given today’s exchange rate, a rise in the expected> future price of euros in terms of dollars raises the dollar’s expected depreciation rate. For example, if today’s exchange rate is $1.00 per euro and the rate expected to prevail in a year is $1.05 per euro, the expected depreciation rate of the dollar against the euro is (1.05 - 1.00) 1.00 = 0.05; if the expected future exchange rate now rises to $1.06 per euro, the expected depreciation rate also rises, to (1.06 - 1.00) 1.00 = 0.06. > Because a rise in the expected depreciation rate of the dollar raises the expected dollar return on euro deposits, the >downward-sloping schedule shifts to the right, as 1 in Figure 14-6. At the initial exchange rate E+ :, there is now an excess supply of dollar deposits: Euro deposits offer a higher expected> rate of return (measured in dollar terms) than do dollar deposits. The dollar therefore depreciates against the euro until equilibrium is reached at point 2. We conclude that, all else equal, a rise in the expected future exchange rate causes a rise in the current exchange rate. Similarly, a fall in the expected future exchange rate causes a fall in the current exchange rate.

CASE STUDY What Explains the Carry Trade? Over much of the 2000s, Jap- anese yen interest rates were close to zero (as Figure 14-2 shows) while Australia’s interest rates were comfortably positive, climbing to over 7 percent per year by the spring of 2008. While it might therefore have appeared attractive to borrow yen and

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Investment Return 300

250

200

Australian dollar 150

100

Japanese yen 50

0 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

FIGURE 14-7 Cumulative Total Investment Return in Australian Dollar Compared to Japanese Yen, 2003–2016 The Australian dollar-yen carry trade has been profitable on average but is subject to sudden large reversals, as in 2008.

Source: Exchange rates and three-month treasury yields from Global Financial Data.

invest the proceeds in Australian dollar bonds, the interest parity condition implies that such a strategy should not be systematically profitable: On average, shouldn’t the interest advantage of Australian dollars be wiped out by relative appreciation of the yen? Nonetheless, market actors ranging from Japanese housewives to sophisticated hedge funds did in fact pursue this strategy, investing billions in Australian dollars and driving that currency’s value up, rather than down, against the yen. More generally, international investors frequently borrow low-interest currencies (called “funding” currencies) and buy high-interest currencies (called “investment” currencies), with results that can be profitable over long periods. This activity is called the carry trade, and while it is generally impossible to document the extent of carry trade positions accurately, they can become very large when sizable international interest differentials open up. Is the prevalence of the carry trade evidence that interest parity is wrong? The honest answer is that while interest parity does not hold exactly in practice—in part because of the risk and liquidity factors mentioned above—economists are still working hard to understand if the carry trade requires additional explanation. Their work is likely to throw further light on the functioning of foreign exchange markets in particular and financial markets in general. One important hazard of the carry trade is that investment currencies (the high-interest currencies that carry traders target) may experience abrupt crashes.

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Figure 14-7 illustrates this feature of foreign exchange markets, comparing the cumulative return to investing ¥100 in yen bonds and in Australian dollar bonds over different investment horizons, with the initial investment being made in the final quarter of 2002. As you can see, the yen investment yields next to nothing, whereas Australian dollars pay off handsomely, not only because of a high interest rate but because the yen tended to fall against the Australian dollar through the summer of 2008. But in 2008, the Australian dollar crashed against the yen, falling in price from ¥104 to only ¥61 between July and December. As Figure 14-7 shows, this crash did not wipe out the gains to the carry trade strategy entirely—if the strategy had been initiated early enough! Of course, anyone who got into the business late, for example, in 2007, did very poorly indeed. Conversely, anyone savvy enough to unwind the strategy in June 2008 would have doubled his or her money in five and a half years. The carry trade is obviously a very risky business. We can gain some insight into this pattern by imagining that investors expect a gradual 1 percent annual appreciation of the Australian dollar to occur with high probability (say, 90 percent) and a big 40 percent depreciation to occur with a 10 percent probability. Then the expected appreciation rate of the Australian dollar is: Expected appreciation = (0.9) * 1 - (0.1) * 40 = -3.1 percent per year. The negative expected appreciation rate means that the yen is actually expected to appreciate on average against the Australian dollar. Moreover, the probability of a crash occurring in the first six years of the investment is only 1 - (0.9)6 = 1 - 0.53 = 47 percent, less than fifty-fifty.13 The resulting pattern of cumulative returns could easily look much like the one shown in Figure 14-7. Calculations like these are suggestive, and although they are unlikely to explain the full magnitude of carry trade returns, researchers have found that investment currencies are particularly subject to abrupt crashes, and funding currencies to abrupt appreciations.14 Complementary explanations based on risk and liquidity considerations have also been advanced. Often, abrupt currency movements occur during financial crises, which are situations in which other wealth is being lost and liquid cash is particularly valuable. In such circumstances, large losses on carry trade positions are extra painful and may force traders to sell other assets they own at a loss.15 We will say much more about crises in later chapters, but we note for now that the Australian dollar collapse of late 2008 occurred in the midst of a severe global financial crisis. When big carry trade positions emerge, the government officials responsible for international economic policies often lose sleep. In their early phase, carry trade dynamics will drive investment currencies higher as investors pile in and build up ever-larger exposures to a sudden depreciation of the investment currency. This

13If crashes are independent events over time, the probability that a crash does not occur over six years is (0.9)6. Therefore, the probability that a crash does occur in the six-year period is 1 - (0.9)6. 14See Markus K. Brunnermeier, Stefan Nagel, and Lasse H. Pedersen, “Carry Trades and Currency Crashes,” NBER Macroeconomics Annual 23 (2008), pp. 313–347. These findings are consistent with the apparently greater empirical success of the interest parity condition over relatively long periods, as documented by Menzie Chinn, “The (Partial) Rehabilitation of Interest Rate Parity in the Floating Rate Era: Longer Horizons, Alternative Expectations, and Emerging Markets,” Journal of International Money and Finance 25 (February 2006), pp. 7–21. 15See Brunnermeier et al., ibid., as well as Craig Burnside, “Carry Trades and Risk,” in Jessica James, Ian Marsh, and Lucio Sarno, eds., Handbook of Exchange Rates (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), pp. 283–312.

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makes the crash bigger when it occurs, as wrong-footed investors all scramble to repay their funding loans. The result is greater exchange rate volatility in general, as well as the possibility of big trader losses with negative repercussions in stock markets, bond markets, and markets for interbank loans.

SUMMARY

1. An exchange rate is the price of one country’s currency in terms of another country’s currency. Exchange rates play a role in spending decisions because they enable us to translate different countries’ prices into comparable terms. All else equal, a depreciation of a country’s currency against foreign currencies (a rise in the home currency prices of foreign currencies) makes its exports cheaper and its imports more expensive. An appreciation of its currency (a fall in the home currency prices of foreign currencies) makes its exports more expensive and its imports cheaper. 2. Exchange rates are determined in the foreign exchange market. The major participants in that market are commercial banks, international corporations, nonbank financial institutions, and national central banks. Commercial banks play a pivotal role in the market because they facilitate the exchange of interest-bearing bank deposits, which make up the bulk of foreign exchange trading. Even though foreign exchange trading takes place in many financial centers around the world, modern communication technology links those centers together into a single market that is open 24 hours a day. An important category of foreign exchange trading is forward trading, in which parties agree to exchange currencies on some future date at a prenegotiated exchange rate. In contrast, spot trades are settled immediately. 3. Because the exchange rate is the relative price of two assets, it is most appropri- ately thought of as being an asset price itself. The basic principle of asset pricing is that an asset’s current value depends on its expected future purchasing power. In evaluating an asset, savers look at the expected rate of return it offers, that is, the rate at which the value of an investment in the asset is expected to rise over time. It is possible to measure an asset’s expected rate of return in different ways, each depending on the units in which the asset’s value is measured. Savers care about an asset’s expected real rate of return, the rate at which its value expressed in terms of a representative output basket is expected to rise. 4. When relative asset returns are relevant, as in the foreign exchange market, it is appro- priate to compare expected changes in assets’ currency values, provided those values are expressed in the same currency. If risk and liquidity factors do not strongly influence the demands for foreign currency assets, participants in the foreign exchange market always prefer to hold those assets yielding the highest expected rate of return. 5. The returns on deposits traded in the foreign exchange market depend on interest rates and expected exchange rate changes. To compare the expected rates of return offered by dollar and euro deposits, for example, the return on euro deposits must be expressed in dollar terms by adding to the euro interest rate the expected rate of depreciation of the dollar against the euro (or rate of appreciation of the euro against the dollar) over the deposit’s holding period. 6. Equilibrium in the foreign exchange market requires interest parity; that is, deposits of all currencies must offer the same expected rate of return when returns are measured in comparable terms.

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7. For given interest rates and a given expectation of the future exchange rate, the interest parity condition tells us the current equilibrium exchange rate. When the expected dollar return on euro deposits exceeds that on dollar deposits, for example, the dollar immediately depreciates against the euro. Other things equal, a dollar depreciation today reduces the expected dollar return on euro deposits by reducing the depreciation rate of the dollar against the euro expected for the future. Similarly, when the expected return on euro deposits is below that on dollar deposits, the dollar must immediately appreciate against the euro. Other things equal, a current appreciation of the dollar makes euro deposits more attractive by increasing the dollar’s expected future depreciation against the European currency. 8. All else equal, a rise in dollar interest rates causes the dollar to appreciate against the euro while a rise in euro interest rates causes the dollar to depreciate against the euro. Today’s exchange rate is also altered by changes in its expected future level. If there is a rise in the expected future level of the dollar/euro rate, for example, then at unchanged interest rates, today’s dollar/euro exchange rate will also rise.

KEY TERMS

appreciation, p. 380 interbank trading, p. 383 rate of depreciation, p. 394 arbitrage, p. 385 interest parity condition, rate of return, p. 388 depreciation, p. 380 p. 397 real rate of return, p. 389 exchange rate, p. 378 interest rate, p. 392 risk, p. 391 foreign exchange market, p. 382 liquidity, p. 391 spot exchange rate, p. 386 forward exchange rate, p. 386 rate of appreciation, p. 395 vehicle currency, p. 385

PROBLEMS Pearson MyLab Economics

1. In Delhi, a haircut costs 135 rupees (INR). The same haircut costs 15 Singapore dollars (SGD) in Singapore. At an exchange rate of 50 INR per SGD, what is the price of an Indian haircut in terms of a Singapore haircut? Keeping all else equal, how does this relative price change if the INR depreciates to 55 INR per SGD? Compared to the initial situation, does a Singapore haircut become more or less expensive in relation to an Indian haircut? 2. As defined in footnote 3, cross exchange rates are exchange rates quoted against currencies other than the U.S. dollar. If you return to Table 14-1, you will notice that it lists not only exchange rates against the dollar, but also cross rates against the euro and the pound sterling. The fact that we can derive the Swiss franc/Israeli shekel exchange rate, say, from the dollar/franc rate and the dollar/shekel rate follows from ruling out a potentially profitable arbitrage strategy known as triangular arbitrage. As an example, suppose the Swiss franc price of a shekel were below the Swiss franc price of a dollar times the dollar price of a shekel. Explain why, rather than buying shekels with dollars, it would be cheaper to buy Swiss francs with dollars and use the francs to buy the shekels. Thus, the hypothesized situation offers a riskless profit opportunity and therefore is not consistent with profit maximization. 3. Table 14-1 reports exchange rates not only against the U.S. dollar, but also against the euro and the pound sterling. (Each row gives the price of the dollar, euro, and pound, respectively, in terms of a different currency.) At the same time, the table gives the spot dollar prices of the euro ($1.1332 per euro) and the pound sterling ($1.4518 per pound). Pick any five currencies from the table and show that the three quoted spot exchange rates (in terms of dollars, euros, and pounds) approximately rule out triangular arbitrage. Why do we need to add the word “approximately”?

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4. Petroleum is sold in a world market and tends to be priced in U.S. dollars. The Phosphate Group of Morocco must import petroleum to produce fertilizer and other chemicals. How are its profits affected when the Dirham (Moroccan currency) depreciates against the dollar? 5. Calculate the euro rates of return on the following assets: a. A painting whose price rises from €200,000 to €250,000 in a year. b. A diamond whose price rises from €20 000 to €21 000 between 2014 and 2015. c. A £10,000 deposit in a London bank in a year when the interest rate on pounds is 2 percent and the €/£ exchange rate moves from €1.36 per pound to 1.17 per pound. 6. What would be the real rates of return on the assets in the preceding question if the price changes described were accompanied by a simultaneous 10 percent increase in all dollar prices? 7. Suppose the Mexican peso (MXN) interest rate and the Indian rupee (INR) interest rate are the same, 5 percent per year. What is the relation between the current equilibrium MXN/INR exchange rate and its expected future level? Suppose the expected future MXN/INR exchange rate, 3.40 INR per Mexican peso, remains constant as India’s interest rate rises to 10 percent per year. If the Mexican interest rate also remains constant, what is the new equilibrium MXN/INR exchange rate? 8. Traders in asset markets suddenly learn that the interest rate on dollars will decline in the near future. Use the diagrammatic analysis of this chapter to determine the effect on the current dollar/euro exchange rate, assuming current interest rates on dollar and euro deposits do not change. 9. We noted that we could have developed our diagrammatic analysis of foreign exchange market equilibrium from the perspective of Europe, with the euro/dollar exchange rate E: +(= 1 E+ :) on the vertical axis, a schedule vertical at R: to indicate the euro return on euro deposits, and a downward-sloping schedule showing > > > how the euro return on dollar deposits varies with E: +. Derive this alternative picture of equilibrium and use it to examine the effect of> changes in interest rates and the expected future exchange rate. Do your answers agree with those we found earlier? 10. A report appeared in the Financial Times on 18 January, 2016, noted that the South Korean Finance Minister had voiced confidence in China’s economic outlook, and had declared that ‘he endorsed Beijing’s predictions of a “soft landing”, saying Seoul expected China’s economy to grow between 6 per cent and 7 per cent this year.’ a. In your opinion, why was the South Korean Minister so concerned about Chi- na’s “soft landing”? b. Do you think that the rate of exchange of the Won/RMB is a factor in this “soft landing”? 11. Suppose the dollar exchange rates of the euro and the yen are equally variable. The euro, however, tends to depreciate unexpectedly against the dollar when the return on the rest of your wealth is unexpectedly high, while the yen tends to appreciate unexpectedly in the same circumstances. As a European resident, which currency, the dollar or the yen, would be considered riskier? 12. Does any of the discussion in this chapter lead you to believe that dollar deposits may have liquidity characteristics different from those of other currency deposits? If so, how would the differences affect the interest differential between, say, dollar and Mexican peso deposits? Do you have any guesses about how the liquidity of euro deposits may be changing over time?

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13. In October 1979, the U.S. central bank (the Federal Reserve System) announced it would play a less active role in limiting fluctuations in dollar interest rates. After this new policy was put into effect, the dollar’s exchange rates against foreign currencies became more volatile. Does our analysis of the foreign exchange market suggest any connection between these two events? 14. The central bank of a country announces it would play a less active role in limiting fluctuations in its currency interest rates. Do you think that the exchange rate of its currency will become more volatile? Why? 15. Take the two currencies—South African Rand (ZAR) and Indonesia Naira (NGN). Suppose the one-year forward exchange rate is 23 NGN per ZAR and the spot exchange rate is 20 NGN per ZAR. What is the forward premium on NGN (the forward discount on ZAR)? What is the difference between the interest rate on one-year ZAR deposits and that on one-year NGN deposits (assuming no repayment risk)? 16. Europe’s single currency, the euro, was introduced in January 1999, replacing the currencies of 11 European Union members, including France, Germany, Italy, and Spain (but not Britain; see Chapter 21). Do you think that, immediately after the euro’s introduction, the value of foreign exchange trading in euros was greater or less than the euro value of the pre-1999 trade in the 11 original national currencies? Explain your answer. 17. Multinationals generally have production plants in a number of countries. Con- sequently, they can move production from expensive locations to cheaper ones in response to various economic developments—a phenomenon called outsourcing when a domestically based firm moves part of its production abroad. If the dollar depreciates, what would you expect to happen to outsourcing by American companies? Explain and provide an example. 18. In the beginning of 2015 the interest rate of some currencies are the following:

Australia 2.25 Canada 0.75 China 5.60 EU- euro 0.05 Japan 0.10 Mexico 5.75 New Zealand 3.5 Russia 15 South Africa 5.75 USA 0.25

a. What are in theory the best carry trade cases? b. If you take in account the exchange rate variation risk what carry trade operation will you favor? Explain. c. Calculate the carry trade between euro and Mexican Peso and Russian Rouble. Looking at exchange rate data base you have accessed on internet, is this carry trade positive as of January 2017? 19. The chapter explained why exporters cheer when their home currency depreciates. At the same time, domestic consumers find that they pay higher prices, so they should be disappointed when the currency becomes weaker. Why do the exporters usually win out, so that governments often seem to welcome depreciations while trying to avoid appreciations? (Hint: Think about the analogy with protective tariffs.)

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FURTHER READINGS

Sam Y. Cross. All about the Foreign Exchange Market in the United States. New York: Books for Business, 2002. Primer on the United States portion of the market. Wenxin Du, Alexander Tepper, and Adrien Verdelhan. “Deviations from Covered Interest Par- ity.” Mimeo, June 2016, available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2768207. Recent evidence on the relationship between banking stress and covered interest parity. Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The Basics of Foreign Trade and Exchange, at http://www .ny.frb.org/education/fx/index.html. Broad-ranging but highly accessible account of exchange markets and their role. Also supplies many useful Web links. Philipp Hartmann. Currency Competition and Foreign Exchange Markets: The Dollar, the Yen and the Euro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Theoretical and empirical micro- oriented study of the role of international currencies in world trade and asset markets. John Maynard Keynes. A Tract on Monetary Reform, Chapter 3. London: MacMillan, 1923. Classic analysis of the forward exchange market and covered interest parity. Michael R. King, Carol Osler, and Dagfinn Rime. “Foreign Exchange Market Structure, Players, and Evolution,” in Jessica James, Ian Marsh, and Lucio Sarno, eds., Handbook of Exchange Rates. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012, pp. 3–44. Up-to-date overview of foreign exchange market structure. Paul R. Krugman. “The International Role of the Dollar: Theory and Prospect,” in John F. O. Bilson and Richard C. Marston, eds. Exchange Rate Theory and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 261–278. Theoretical and empirical analysis of the dollar’s position as an “international money.” Richard M. Levich. International Financial Markets: Prices and Policies, 2nd edition. Boston: Irwin McGraw-Hill, 2001. Chapters 3–8 of this comprehensive text focus on the foreign exchange market. Michael Mussa. “Empirical Regularities in the Behavior of Exchange Rates and Theories of the Foreign Exchange Market,” in Karl Brunner and Allan H. Meltzer, eds., Policies for Employ- ment, Prices and Exchange Rates, Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 11. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979, pp. 9–57. A classic paper that examines the empirical basis of the asset price approach to exchange rate determination. David Sawyer. “Continuous Linked Settlement (CLS) and Foreign Exchange Settlement Risk.” Financial Stability Review 17 (December 2004), pp. 86–92. Describes the functioning of and rationale for the Continuous Linked Settlement system for rapid settlement of foreign exchange transactions. Julian Walmsley. The Foreign Exchange and Money Markets Guide, 2nd edition. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000. A basic text on the terminology and institutions of the foreign exchange market. Tim Weithers. Foreign Exchange: A Practical Guide to the FX Markets. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006. A clear introduction to foreign exchange instruments and markets.

M14_KRUG4870_11_GE_C14.indd 410 13/10/17 11:03 pm APPENDIX TO CHAPTER 14 Forward Exchange Rates and Covered Interest Parity

This appendix explains how forward exchange rates are determined. Under the assumption that the interest parity condition always holds, a forward exchange rate equals the spot exchange rate expected to prevail on the forward contract’s value date. As the first step in the discussion, we point out the close connection among the forward exchange rate between two currencies, their spot exchange rate, and the interest rates on deposits denominated in those currencies. The connection is described by the covered interest parity condition, which is similar to the (noncovered) interest parity condition defining foreign exchange market equilibrium but involves the forward exchange rate rather than the expected future spot exchange rate. To be concrete, we again consider dollar and euro deposits. Suppose you want to buy a euro deposit with dollars but would like to be certain about the number of dollars it will be worth at the end of a year. You can avoid exchange rate risk by buying a euro deposit and, at the same time, selling the proceeds of your investment forward. When you buy a euro deposit with dollars and at the same time sell the principal and interest forward for dollars, we say you have “covered” yourself, that is, avoided the possibility of an unexpected depreciation of the euro. The covered interest parity condition states that the rates of return on dollar deposits and “covered” foreign deposits must be the same. An example will clarify the meaning of the condition and illustrate why it must always hold. Let F+ : stand for the one-year forward price of euros in terms of dollars, and suppose> F+ : = +1.113 per euro. Assume that at the same time, the spot exchange rate E+ : = >1.05 per euro, R+ = 0.10, and R: = 0.04. The (dollar) rate of return on a dollar> deposit is clearly 0.10, or 10 percent, per year. What is the rate of return on a covered euro deposit? We answer this question as we did in the chapter. A €1 deposit costs $1.05 today, and it is worth €1.04 after a year. If you sell €1.04 forward today at the forward exchange rate of $1.113 per euro, the dollar value of your investment at the end of a year is (+1.113 per euro) * (:1.04) = +1.158. The rate of return on a covered purchase of a euro deposit is therefore (1.158 - 1.05) 1.05 = 0.103. This 10.3 percent per year rate of return exceeds the 10 percent offered by dollar deposits, so covered interest parity does not hold. In this situation, no one would> be willing to hold dollar deposits; everyone would prefer covered euro deposits. More formally, we can express the covered return on euro deposits as

F+ :(1 + R:) - E+ : , > E+ : > > which is approximately equal to

F+ : - E+ : R: + > E+ : > >

411

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when the product R: * (F+ : - E+ :) E+ : is a small number. The covered interest parity condition can therefore be written > > > > R+ = R: + (F+ : - E+ :) E+ :. The quantity > > > >

(F+ : - E+ :) E+ : > > > is called the forward premium on euros against dollars.> (It is also called the forward discount on dollars against euros.) Using this terminology, we can state the covered interest parity condition as follows: The interest rate on dollar deposits equals the interest rate on euro deposits plus the forward premium on euros against dollars (the forward discount on dollars against euros). There is strong empirical evidence that the covered interest parity condition holds for different foreign currency deposits issued within a single financial center. Indeed, currency traders often set the forward exchange rates they quote by looking at current interest rates and spot exchange rates and using the covered interest parity formula.16 Deviations from covered interest parity can occur, however, if the deposits being compared are located in different countries. These deviations occur when asset holders fear that governments may impose regulations that will prevent the free movement of foreign funds across national borders. Our derivation of the covered interest parity condition implicitly assumed there was no political risk of this kind. Deviations can occur also because of fears that banks will fail, making them unable to pay off large deposits, or that the counterparties to forward exchange transactions (usually banks) will not make good on their commitments to deliver currencies. Finally, in some cases, because of these risks, market arbitrageurs may be unwilling (or lack the borrowing capacity) to exploit fully covered interest parity deviations. For these reasons, deviations from covered interest parity can be observed in recent years.17 By comparing the (noncovered) interest parity condition, e R+ = R: + (E+ : - E+ :) E+ :, with the covered interest parity condition,> you will> find> >that both conditions can be true at the same time only if the one-year forward rate quoted today equals the spot exchange rate people expect to materialize a year from today: e F+ : = E+ :. > >

16Empirical evidence supporting the covered interest parity condition is provided by Frank McCormick in “Covered Interest Arbitrage: Unexploited Profits? Comment,” Journal of Political Economy 87 (April 1979), pp. 411–417, and by Kevin Clinton in “Transactions Costs and Covered Interest Arbitrage: Theory and Evidence,” Journal of Political Economy 96 (April 1988), pp. 358–370. 17For a more detailed discussion of the role of political risk in the forward exchange market, see Robert Z. Aliber, “The Interest Parity Theorem: A Reinterpretation,” Journal of Political Economy 81 (November/ December 1973), pp. 1451–1459. Of course, actual government restrictions on cross-border money movements can also cause covered interest parity deviations. On the fear of bank and counterparty failure as a cause for deviations from covered interest parity, see Naohiko Baba and Frank Packer, “Interpreting Devia- tions from Covered Interest Parity During the Financial Market Turmoil of 2007–2008,” Working Paper No. 267, Bank for International Settlements, December 2008. The events underlying this last paper are discussed in Chapter 20. On covered interest parity during the euro crisis (to be discussed in Chapter 21), see Victoria Ivashina, David S. Scharfstein, and Jeremy C. Stein, “Dollar Funding and the Lending Behavior of Global Banks,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 130 (August 2015), pp. 1241–1281. See also the item by Du, Tepper, and Verdelhan in Further Readings.

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This makes intuitive sense. When two parties agree to trade foreign exchange on a date in the future, the exchange rate they agree on is the spot rate they expect to prevail on that date. The important difference between covered and noncovered transactions should be kept in mind, however. Covered transactions do not involve exchange rate risk, whereas noncovered transactions do. The theory of covered interest parity helps explain the close correlation between the movements in spot and forward exchange rates shown in Table 14-1, a correlation typical of all major currencies. The unexpected economic events that affect expected asset returns often have a relatively small effect on international interest rate differences between deposits with short maturities (for example, three months). To maintain covered interest parity, therefore, spot and forward rates for the corresponding maturities must change roughly in proportion to each other. We conclude this appendix with one further application of the covered interest parity condition. To illustrate the role of forward exchange rates, the chapter used the example of an American importer of Japanese radios anxious about the $/¥ exchange rate it would face in 30 days when the time came to pay the supplier. In the example, Radio Shack solved the problem by selling forward for yen enough dollars to cover the cost of the radios. But Radio Shack could have solved the problem in a different, more complicated way. It could have (1) borrowed dollars from a bank; (2) sold those dollars immediately for yen at the spot exchange rate and placed the yen in a 30-day yen bank deposit; (3) then, after 30 days, used the proceeds of the maturing yen deposit to pay the Japanese supplier; and (4) used the realized proceeds of the U.S. radio sales, less profits, to repay the original dollar loan. Which course of action—the forward purchase of yen or the sequence of four transactions described in the preceding paragraph—is more profitable for the importer? We leave it to you, as an exercise, to show that the two strategies yield the same profit when the covered interest parity condition holds.

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Price Levels and the Exchange Rate in the Long Run

t the end of 1970, you could have bought 358 Japanese yen with a sin- A gle American dollar; by Christmas 1980, a dollar was worth only 203 yen. Despite a temporary comeback during the 1980s, the dollar’s price in yen slumped to 105 by the summer of 2016. Many investors found these price changes difficult to predict, and as a result fortunes were lost—and made—in the foreign exchange market. What economic forces lie behind such dramatic long-term movements in exchange rates? We have seen that exchange rates are determined by interest rates and expectations about the future, which are, in turn, influenced by conditions in national money markets. To understand fully long-term exchange rate movements, however, we have to extend our model in two directions. First, we must complete our account of the linkages among monetary policies, inflation, interest rates, and exchange rates. Second, we must examine factors other than money supplies and demands—for example, demand shifts in markets for goods and services—that also can have sustained effects on exchange rates. The model of long-run exchange rate behavior that we develop in this chapter provides the framework that actors in asset markets use to forecast future exchange rates. Because the expectations of these agents influence exchange rates immediately, however, predictions about long-run movements in exchange rates are important even in the short run. We therefore will draw heavily on this chapter’s conclusions when we begin our study in Chapter 17 of short-run interactions between exchange rates and output. In the long run, national price levels play a key role in determining both interest rates and the relative prices at which countries’ products are traded. A theory of how national price levels interact with exchange rates is thus central to understanding why exchange rates can change dramatically over periods of several years. We begin our analysis by discussing the theory of purchasing power parity (PPP), which explains movements in the exchange rate between two countries’ currencies by changes in the countries’ price levels. Next, we examine reasons why PPP may fail to give accurate long-run predictions and show how the theory

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must sometimes be modified to account for supply or demand shifts in countries’ output markets. Finally, we look at what our extended PPP theory predicts about how changes in money and output markets affect exchange and interest rates.

LEARNING GOALS

After reading this chapter, you will be able to: ■■ Explain the purchasing power parity theory of exchange rates and the theory’s relationship to international goods-market integration. ■■ Describe how monetary factors such as ongoing price level inflation affect exchange rates in the long run. ■■ Discuss the concept of the real exchange rate. ■■ Understand factors that affect real exchange rates and relative currency prices in the long run. ■■ Explain the relationship between international real interest rate differences and expected changes in real exchange rates.

The Law of One Price To understand the market forces that might give rise to the results predicted by the purchasing power parity theory, we discuss first a related but distinct proposition known as the law of one price. The law of one price states that in competitive markets free of trans- portation costs and official barriers to trade (such as tariffs), identical goods sold in different countries must sell for the same price when their prices are expressed in terms of the same currency. For example, if the dollar/pound exchange rate is $1.50 per pound, a sweater that sells for $45 in New York must sell for £30 in London. The dollar price of the sweater when sold in London is then (+1.50 per pound) * (£30 per sweater) = +45 per sweater, the same as its price in New York. Let’s continue with this example to see why the law of one price must hold when trade is free and there are no transport costs or other trade barriers. If the dollar/pound exchange rate were $1.45 per pound, you could buy a sweater in London by converting +43.50 (= +1.45 per pound * £30) into £30 in the foreign exchange market. Thus, the dollar price of a sweater in London would be only $43.50. If the same sweater were selling for $45 in New York, U.S. importers and British exporters would have an incentive to buy sweaters in London and ship them to New York, pushing the London price up and the New York price down until prices were equal in the two locations. Similarly, at an exchange rate of $1.55 per pound, the dollar price of sweaters in London would be +46.50 (= +1.55 per pound * £30), $1.50 more than in New York. Sweaters would be shipped from west to east until a single price prevailed in the two markets. The law of one price is a restatement, in terms of currencies, of a principle that was important in the trade theory portion of this book: When trade is open and costless, identical goods must trade at the same relative prices regardless of where they are sold. We remind you of that principle here because it provides one link between the domestic prices of goods and exchange rates. We can state the law of one price formally as i i follows: Let PUS be the dollar price of good i when sold in the United States, PE the corresponding euro price in Europe. Then the law of one price implies that the dollar price of good i is the same wherever it is sold. i i PUS = (E+ :) * (PE). >

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Equivalently, the dollar/euro exchange rate is the ratio of good i ’s U.S. and Eur opean money prices, i i E+ : = PUS PE. > > Purchasing Power Parity The theory of purchasing power parity states that the exchange rate between two countries’ currencies equals the ratio of the countries’ price levels. Recall from Chapter 15 that the domestic purchasing power of a country’s currency is reflected in the country’s price level, the money price of a reference basket of goods and services. The PPP theory therefore predicts that a fall in a currency’s domestic purchasing power (as indicated by an increase in the domestic price level) will be associated with a proportional currency depreciation in the foreign exchange market. Symmetrically, PPP predicts that an increase in the currency’s domestic purchasing power will be associated with a proportional currency appreciation. The basic idea of PPP was put forth in the writings of 19th-century British economists, among them David Ricardo (the originator of the theory of comparative advantage). Gustav Cassel, a Swedish economist writing in the early 20th century, popularized PPP by making it the centerpiece of a theory of exchange rates. While there has been much controversy about the general validity of PPP, the theory does highlight important factors behind exchange rate movements. To express the PPP theory in symbols, let PUS be the dollar price of a reference commodity basket sold in the United States and PE the euro price of the same basket in Europe. (Assume for now that a single basket accurately measures money’s purchasing power in both countries.) Then PPP predicts a dollar/euro exchange rate of

E+ : = PUS PE. (16-1) If, for example, the reference commodity> basket> costs $200 in the United States and €160 in Europe, PPP predicts a dollar/euro exchange rate of $1.25 per euro ($200 per basket/€160 per basket). If the U.S. price level were to triple (to $600 per basket), so would the dollar price of a euro: PPP would imply an exchange rate of $3.75 per euro (= +600 per basket :160 per basket). By rearranging equation (16-1) to read > PUS = (E+ :) * (PE), we get an alternative interpretation of PPP. The> left side of this equation is the dollar price of the reference commodity basket in the United States; the right side is the dollar price of the reference basket when purchased in Europe (that is, its euro price multiplied by the dollar price of a euro). These two prices are the same if PPP holds. PPP thus asserts that all countries’ price levels are equal when measured in terms of the same currency. Equivalently, the right side of the last equation measures the purchasing power of a dollar when exchanged for euros and spent in Europe. PPP therefore holds when, at going exchange rates, every currency’s domestic purchasing power is always the same as its foreign purchasing power.

The Relationship between PPP and the Law of One Price Superficially, the statement of PPP given by equation (16-1) looks like the law of one i i price, which says that E+ : = PUS PE for any commodity i. There is a difference between PPP and the law of one price, however: The law of one price applies to individual > >

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commodities (such as commodity i), while PPP applies to the general price level, which is a composite of the prices of all the commodities that enter into the reference basket. If the law of one price holds true for every commodity, of course, PPP must hold automatically as long as the reference baskets used to reckon different countries’ price levels are the same. Proponents of the PPP theory argue, however, that its validity (in particular, its validity as a long-run theory) does not require the law of one price to hold exactly. Even when the law of one price fails to hold for each individual commodity, the argument goes, prices and exchange rates should not stray too far from the relation predicted by PPP. When goods and services become temporarily more expensive in one country than in others, the demands for its currency and its products fall, pushing the exchange rate and domestic prices back in line with PPP. The opposite situation of relatively cheap domestic products leads, analogously, to currency appreciation and price level inflation. PPP thus asserts that even when the law of one price is not literally true, the economic forces behind it will help eventually to equalize a currency’s purchasing power in all countries.

Absolute PPP and Relative PPP The statement that exchange rates equal relative price levels [equation (16-1)] is sometimes referred to as absolute PPP. Absolute PPP implies a proposition known as relative PPP, which states that the percentage change in the exchange rate between two currencies over any period equals the difference between the percentage changes in national price levels. Relative PPP thus translates absolute PPP from a statement about price and exchange rate levels into one about price and exchange rate changes. It asserts that prices and exchange rates change in a way that preserves the ratio of each currency’s domestic and foreign purchasing powers. If the U.S. price level rises by 10 percent over a year while Europe’s rises by only 5 percent, for example, relative PPP predicts a 5 percent depreciation of the dollar against the euro. The dollar’s 5 percent depreciation against the euro just cancels the 5 percent by which U.S. inflation exceeds European inflation, leaving the relative domestic and foreign purchasing powers of both currencies unchanged. More formally, relative PPP between the United States and Europe would be written as

(E+ :,t - E+ :,t- 1) E+ :,t- 1 = pUS,t - pE,t (16-2) > > > where pt denotes an inflation rate [that> is, pt = (Pt - Pt- 1) Pt- 1, the percentage change in a price level between dates t and t - 1].1 Unlike absolute PPP, relative PPP can be defined only with respect to the time interval over which> price levels and the exchange rate change.

1To be precise, equation (16-1) implies a good approximation to equation (16-2) when rates of change are not too large. The exact relationship is

E+ :,t E+ :,t- 1 = (PUS,t PUS,t- 1) (PE,t PE,t- 1). After subtracting 1 from both sides,> > we> write the preceding> exact> equation> as

(E+ :,t - E+ :,t- 1) E+ :,t- 1 = (pUS,t + 1)(PE,t- 1 PE,t) - (PE,t PE,t) > > > > = (pUS,t - pE,t) (1 +> pE,t) >

= (pUS,t - pE,t)>- pE,t(pUS,t - pE,t) (1 + pE,t).

But if pUS,t and pE,t are small, the term -pE,t(pUS,t - pE,t) (1 + pE,t) in the last equality> is negligibly small, implying a very good approximation to (16-2). >

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In practice, national governments do not take pains to compute the price level indexes they publish using an internationally standardized basket of commodities. Absolute PPP makes no sense, however, unless the two baskets whose prices are compared in equation (16-1) are the same. (There is no reason to expect different commodity baskets to sell for the same price!) The notion of relative PPP therefore comes in handy when we have to rely on government price level statistics to evaluate PPP. It makes logical sense to compare percentage exchange rate changes to inflation differences, as above, even when countries base their price level estimates on product baskets that differ in coverage and composition. Relative PPP is important also because it may be valid even when absolute PPP is not. Provided the factors causing deviations from absolute PPP are more or less stable over time, percentage changes in relative price levels can still approximate percentage changes in exchange rates.

A Long-Run Exchange Rate Model Based on PPP When combined with the framework of money demand and supply that we developed in Chapter 15, the assumption of PPP leads to a useful theory of how exchange rates and monetary factors interact in the long run. Because factors that do not influence money supply or money demand play no explicit role in this theory, it is known as the monetary approach to the exchange rate. The monetary approach is this chapter’s first step in developing a general long-run theory of exchange rates. We think of the monetary approach as a long-run and not a short-run theory because it does not allow for the price rigidities that seem important in explaining short-run macroeconomic developments, in particular departures from full employment. Instead, the monetary approach proceeds as if prices can adjust right away to maintain full employment as well as PPP. Here, as in Chapter 15, when we refer to a variable’s “long- run” value, we mean the variable’s equilibrium value in a hypothetical world of perfectly flexible output and factor market prices. There is actually considerable controversy among macroeconomists about the sources of apparent price level stickiness, with some maintaining that prices and wages only appear rigid and in reality adjust immediately to clear markets. To an economist of the aforementioned school, this chapter’s models would describe the short-run behavior of an economy in which the speed of price level adjustment is so great that no significant unemployment ever occurs.

The Fundamental Equation of the Monetary Approach To develop the monetary approach’s predictions for the dollar/euro exchange rate, we will assume that in the long run, the foreign exchange market sets the rate so that PPP holds [see equation (16-1)]:

E+ : = PUS PE. > In other words, we assume the above equation >would hold in a world where there are no market rigidities to prevent the exchange rate and other prices from adjusting immediately to levels consistent with full employment. In Chapter 15, equation (15-5) showed how we can explain domestic price levels in terms of domestic money demands and supplies. In the United States,

s PUS = M US L(R+, YUS), (16-3) >

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while in Europe,

s PE = M E L(R:, YE). (16-4) As before, we have used the symbol M s to> stand for a country’s money supply and L(R, Y) to stand for its aggregate real money demand, which decreases when the interest rate rises and increases when real output rises.2 Equations (16-3) and (16-4) show how the monetary approach to the exchange rate comes by its name. According to the statement of PPP in equation (16-1), the dollar price of a euro is simply the dollar price of U.S. output divided by the euro price of European output. These two price levels, in turn, are determined completely by the supply and demand for each currency area’s money: The United States’ price level is the U.S. money supply divided by U.S. real money demand, as shown in (16-3), and Europe’s price level similarly is the European money supply divided by European real money demand, as shown in (16-4). The monetary approach therefore makes the general prediction that the exchange rate, which is the relative price of American and European money, is fully determined in the long run by the relative supplies of those mon- ies and the relative real demands for them. Shifts in interest rates and output levels affect the exchange rate only through their influences on money demand. In addition, the monetary approach makes a number of specific predictions about the long-run effects on the exchange rate of changes in money supplies, interest rates, and output levels: 1. Money supplies. Other things equal, a permanent rise in the U.S. money supply s M US causes a proportional increase in the long-run U.S. price level PUS, as equation (16-3) shows. Because under PPP, E+ : = PUS PE; however, E+ : also rises in the long run in proportion to the increase> in the U.S. money supply. >(For example, s > if M US rises by 10 percent, PUS and E+ : both eventually rise by 10 percent as well.) Thus, an increase in the U.S. money> supply causes a proportional long-run depreciation of the dollar against the euro. Conversely, equation (16-4) shows that a permanent increase in the European money supply causes a proportional increase in the long-run European price level. Under PPP, this price level rise implies a proportional long-run appreciation of the dollar against the euro (which is the same as a proportional depreciation of the euro against the dollar). 2. Interest rates. A rise in the interest rate R+ on dollar-denominated assets lowers real U.S. money demand L(R+, YUS). By (16-3), the long-run U.S. price level rises, and under PPP the dollar must depreciate against the euro in proportion to this U.S. price level increase. A rise in the interest rate R: on euro-denominated assets has the reverse long-run exchange rate effect. Because real European money demand L(R:, YE) falls, Europe’s price level rises, by (16-4). Under PPP, the dollar must appreciate against the euro in proportion to Europe’s price level increase. 3. Output levels. A rise in U.S. output raises real U.S. money demand L(R+, YUS), leading by (16-3) to a fall in the long-run U.S. price level. According to PPP, there is an appreciation of the dollar against the euro. Symmetrically, a rise in European output raises L(R:, YE) and, by (16-4), causes a fall in Europe’s long-run price level. PPP predicts that this development will make the dollar depreciate against the euro. To understand these predictions, remember that the monetary approach, like any long-run theory, essentially assumes price levels adjust as quickly as exchange rates

2To simplify the notation, we assume identical money demand functions for the United States and Europe.

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do—that is, right away. For example, a rise in real U.S. output raises the transactions demand for real U.S. money balances. According to the monetary approach, the U.S. price level drops immediately to bring about a market-clearing increase in the supply of real money balances. PPP implies that this instantaneous American price deflation is accompanied by an instantaneous dollar appreciation on the foreign exchanges. The monetary approach leads to a result familiar from Chapter 15, that the long-run foreign exchange value of a country’s currency moves in proportion to its money supply (prediction 1). The theory also raises what seems to be a paradox (prediction 2). In our previous examples, we always found that a currency appreciates when the interest rate it offers rises relative to foreign interest rates. How is it that we have now arrived at precisely the opposite conclusion—that a rise in a country’s interest rate depreciates its currency by lowering the real demand for its money? At the end of Chapter 14, we warned that no account of how a change in interest rates affects the exchange rate is complete until we specify exactly why interest rates have changed. This point explains the apparent contradiction in our findings about interest and exchange rates. To resolve the puzzle, however, we must first examine more closely how monetary policies and interest rates are connected in the long run.

Ongoing Inflation, Interest Parity, and PPP In Chapter 15, we saw that a permanent increase in the level of a country’s money supply ultimately results in a proportional rise in its price level but has no effect on the long-run values of the interest rate or real output. While the conceptual experiment of a one-time, stepwise money supply change is useful for thinking about the long-run effects of money, it is not very realistic as a description of actual monetary policies. More plausibly, the monetary authorities choose a growth rate for the money supply, say, 5, 10, or 50 percent per year and then allow money to grow gradually, through incremental but frequent increases. What are the long-run effects of a policy that allows the money supply to grow smoothly forever at a positive rate? The reasoning in Chapter 15 suggests that continuing money supply growth will require a continuing rise in the price level—a situation of ongoing inflation. As firms and workers catch on to the fact that the money supply is growing steadily at, say, a 10 percent annual rate, they will adjust by raising prices and wages by the same 10 percent every year, thus keeping their real incomes constant. Full-employment output depends on supplies of productive factors, but it is safe to assume that factor supplies, and thus output, are unaffected over the long run by different choices of a constant growth rate for the money supply. Other things equal, money supply growth at a constant rate eventually results in ongoing price level inflation at the same rate, but changes in this long-run inflation rate do not affect the full-employment output level or the long-run relative prices of goods and services. The interest rate, however, is definitely not independent of the money supply growth rate in the long run. While the long-run interest rate does not depend on the absolute level of the money supply, continuing growth in the money supply eventually will affect the interest rate. The easiest way to see how a permanent increase in inflation affects the long-run interest rate is by combining PPP with the interest rate parity condition on which our previous analysis of exchange rate determination was built. As in Chapters 14 and 15, the condition of interest parity between dollar and euro assets is

e R+ = R: + (E+ : - E+ :) E+ : > > > >

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[recall equation (14-2), p. 369]. Now let’s ask how this parity condition, which must hold in the long run as well as in the short run, fits with the other parity condition we are assuming in our long-run model, purchasing power parity. According to relative PPP, the percentage change in the dollar/euro exchange rate over the next year, say, will equal the difference between the inflation rates of the United States and Europe over that year [see equation (16-2)]. Since people understand this relationship, however, it must also be true that they expect the percentage exchange rate change to equal the U.S.–Europe inflation difference. The interest parity condition written above now tells us the following: If people expect relative PPP to hold, the difference between the interest rates offered by dollar and euro deposits will equal the difference between the inflation rates expected, over the relevant horizon, in the United States and in Europe. Some additional notation is helpful in deriving this result more formally. If Pe is the price level expected in a country for a year from today, the expected inflation rate in that country, pe, is the expected percentage increase in the price level over the coming year:

pe = (Pe - P) P. If relative PPP holds, however, market participants> will also expect relative PPP to hold, which means that we can replace the actual depreciation and inflation rates in equation (16-2) with the values the market expects to materialize:

e e e (E+ : - E+ :) E+ : = pUS - pE. By combining this “expected”> version> > >of relative PPP with the interest parity condition e R+ = R: + (E+ : - E+ :) E+ : > > > and rearranging, we arrive at a formula that expresses> the international interest rate difference as the difference between expected national inflation rates:

e e R+ - R: = pUS - pE. (16-5)

If, as PPP predicts, currency depreciation is expected to offset the international inflation e e difference (so that the expected dollar depreciation rate is pUS - pE), the interest rate difference must equal the expected inflation difference.

The Fisher Effect Equation (16-5) gives us the long-run relationship between ongoing inflation and interest rates that we need to explain the monetary approach’s predictions about how interest rates affect exchange rates. The equation tells us that all else equal, a rise in a country’s expected inflation rate will eventually cause an equal rise in the interest rate that deposits of its currency offer. Similarly, a fall in the expected inflation rate will eventually cause a fall in the interest rate. This long-run relationship between inflation and interest rates is called the Fisher effect. The Fisher effect implies, for example, that if U.S. inflation were to rise permanently from a constant level of 5 percent per year to a constant level of 10 percent per year, dollar interest rates would eventually catch up with the higher inflation, rising by 5 percentage points per year from their initial level. These changes would leave the real rate of return on dollar assets, measured in terms of U.S. goods and services, unchanged.

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The Fisher effect is therefore another example of the general idea that in the long run, purely monetary developments should have no effect on an economy’s relative prices.3 The Fisher effect is behind the seemingly paradoxical monetary approach prediction that a currency depreciates in the foreign exchange market when its interest rate rises relative to foreign currency interest rates. In the long-run equilibrium assumed by the monetary approach, a rise in the difference between home and foreign interest rates occurs only when expected home inflation rises relative to expected foreign inflation. This is certainly not the case in the short run, when the domestic price level is sticky. In the short run, as we saw in Chapter 15, the interest rate can rise when the domestic money supply falls because the sticky domestic price level leads to an excess demand for real money balances at the initial interest rate. Under the flexible-price monetary approach, however, the price level would fall right away, leaving the real money supply unchanged and thus making the interest rate change unnecessary. We can better understand how interest rates and exchange rates interact under the monetary approach by thinking through an example. Our example illustrates why the monetary approach associates sustained interest rate hikes with current as well as future currency depreciation, and sustained interest rate declines with appreciation. Imagine that at time t0, the Federal Reserve unexpectedly increases the growth rate of the U.S. money supply from p to the higher level p + ∆p. Figure 16-1 illustrates how this change affects the dollar/euro exchange rate, E+ :, as well as other U.S. variables, under the assumptions of the monetary approach.> To simplify the graphs, we assume that in Europe, the inflation rate remains constant at zero. Figure 16-1a shows the sudden acceleration of U.S. money supply growth at time t0. (We have scaled the vertical axes of the graphs so that constant slopes represent constant proportional growth rates of variables.) The policy change generates expectations of more rapid currency depreciation in the future: Under PPP the dollar will now depreciate at the rate p + ∆p rather than at the lower rate p. Interest parity therefore 1 requires the dollar interest rate to rise, as shown in Figure 16-1b, from its initial level R+ 2 1 to a new level that reflects the extra expected dollar depreciation, R+ = R+ + ∆p [see equation (16-5)]. Notice that this adjustment leaves the euro interest rate unchanged; but since Europe’s money supply and output haven’t changed, the original euro interest rate will still maintain equilibrium in Europe’s money market. You can see from Figure 16-1a that the level of the money supply does not actually jump upward at t0—only the future growth rate changes. Since there is no immediate increase in the money supply—but there is an interest rate rise that reduces money demand—there would be an excess supply of real U.S. money balances at the price level prevailing just prior to t0. In the face of this potential excess supply, the U.S. price level jumps upward at t0 (see Figure 16-1c), reducing the real money supply so that it again equals real money demand [see equation (16-3)]. Consistently with the upward jump in PUS at t0, Figure 16-1d shows the simultaneous proportional upward jump in E+ : implied by PPP. >How can we visualize the reaction of the foreign exchange market at time t0? The dollar interest rate rises not because of a change in current levels of money supply or demand, but solely because people expect more rapid future money supply growth and dollar depreciation. As investors respond by moving into foreign deposits, which

3The effect is named after Irving Fisher of Yale University, one of the great American economists of the early 20th century. The effect is discussed at length in his book The Theory of Interest (New York: Macmil- lan, 1930). Fisher, incidentally, gave an early account of the interest parity condition on which our theory of foreign exchange market equilibrium is based.

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(a) U.S. money (b) Dollar interest supply, MUS rate, R$

2 1 R$ = R$ + Δπ

Slope = π + Δπ 1 R$ M US,t0

Slope = π

t0 Time t0 Time

Slope = π + Δπ Slope = π + Δπ

Slope = π Slope = π

t0 Time t0 Time

Figure 16-1 Long-Run Time Paths of U.S. Economic Variables after a Permanent Increase in the Growth Rate of the U.S. Money Supply

After the money supply growth rate increases at time t0 in panel (a), the interest rate [in panel (b)], price level [in panel (c)], and exchange rate [in panel (d)] move to new long-run equilibrium paths. (The money supply, price level, and exchange rate are all measured on a natural logarithmic scale, which makes variables that change at constant proportional rates appear as straight lines when they are graphed against time. The slope of the line equals the variable’s proportional growth rate.)

momentarily offer higher expected returns, the dollar depreciates sharply in the foreign exchange market, moving to a new trend line along which depreciation is more rapid 4 than it was up to time t0. Notice how different assumptions about the speed of price level adjustment lead to contrasting predictions about how exchange and interest rates interact. In the example of a fall in the level of the money supply under sticky prices, an interest rate rise is needed to preserve money market equilibrium, given that the price level

4 In the general case in which Europe’s inflation rate pE is not zero, the dollar, rather than depreciating against the euro at rate p before t0 and at rate p + ∆p afterward, depreciates at rate p - pE until t0 and at rate p + ∆p - pE thereafter.

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cannot do so by dropping immediately in response to the money supply reduction. In that sticky-price case, an interest rate rise is associated with lower expected inflation and a long-run currency appreciation, so the currency appreciates immediately. In our monetary approach example of a rise in money supply growth, however, an interest rate increase is associated with higher expected inflation and a currency that will be weaker on all future dates. An immediate currency depreciation is the result.5 These contrasting results of interest rate changes underlie our earlier warning that an explanation of exchange rates based on interest rates must carefully account for the factors that cause interest rates to move. These factors can simultaneously affect expected future exchange rates and can therefore have a decisive impact on the foreign exchange market’s response to the interest rate change. The appendix to this chapter shows in detail how expectations change in the case we analyzed.

Empirical Evidence on PPP and the Law of One Price How well does the PPP theory explain actual data on exchange rates and national price levels? A brief answer is that all versions of the PPP theory do badly in explaining the facts. In particular, changes in national price levels often tell us relatively little about exchange rate movements. Do not conclude from this evidence, however, that the effort you’ve put into learning about PPP has been wasted. As we’ll see later in this chapter, PPP is a key building block of exchange rate models that are more realistic than the monetary approach. Indeed, the empirical failures of PPP give us important clues about how more realistic models should be set up. To test absolute PPP, economic researchers compare the international prices of a broad reference basket of commodities, making careful adjustments for intercountry quality differences among supposedly identical goods. These comparisons typically conclude that absolute PPP is way off the mark: The prices of identical commodity baskets, when converted to a single currency, differ substantially across countries. Even the law of one price has not fared well in some recent studies of price data broken down by commodity type. Manufactured goods that seem to be very similar to each other have sold at widely different prices in various markets since the early 1970s. Because the argument leading to absolute PPP builds on the law of one price, it is not surprising that PPP does not stand up well to the data.6 Relative PPP is sometimes a reasonable approximation to the data, but it, too, usually performs poorly.

5National money supplies typically trend upward over time, as in Figure 16-1a. Such trends lead to corresponding upward trends in price levels; if two countries’ price level trends differ, PPP implies a trend in their exchange rate as well. From now on, when we refer to a change in the money supply, price level, or exchange rate, we will mean by this a change in the level of the variable relative to its previously expected trend path—that is, a parallel shift in the trend path. When instead we want to consider changes in the slopes of trend paths themselves, we will say so explicitly. 6Some of the negative evidence on absolute PPP is discussed in the Case Study to follow. Regarding the law of one price, see, for example, Peter Isard, “How Far Can We Push the Law of One Price?” American Economic Review 67 (December 1977), pp. 942–948; Gita Gopinath, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Chang-Tai Hsieh, and Nicholas Li, “International Prices, Costs, and Markup Differences,” American Economic Review 101 (October 2011), pp. 2450–2486; Mario J. Crucini and Anthony Landry, “Accounting for Real Exchange Rates Using Micro-Data,” Working Paper 17812, National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2012; and the paper by Goldberg and Knetter in Further Readings.

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Figure 16-2 illustrates relative PPP’s weakness by plotting both the yen/dollar exchange rate, E¥ +, and the ratio of the Japanese and U.S. price levels, PJ PUS, through 2015. Price levels are measured by indexes reported by the Japanese and U.S. governments.7 > > Relative PPP predicts that E¥ + and PJ PUS will move in proportion, but clearly they do not. In the early 1980s, there> was a steep appreciation of the dollar against the yen even though, with Japan’s price level consistently> falling relative to that in the United States, relative PPP suggests that the dollar should have depreciated instead. The same inflation trends continued after the mid-1980s, but the yen then appreciated by far more than the amount that PPP would have predicted, before returning to the PPP trend around 2000. Only over fairly long periods is relative PPP approximately satisfied. In view of the lengthy departures from PPP in between, however, that theory appears to be of limited use even as a long-run explanation.

Exchange rate (E ¥/$), Japan-U.S. price level ratio (PJ /PUS) 260

240

220

200

180

160 PJ /PUS

140

120

E ¥/$ 100

60 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014

Figure 16-2 Pearson MyLab Economics Real-time data The Yen/Dollar Exchange Rate and Relative Japan–U.S. Price Levels, 1980–2015 The graph shows that relative PPP does not track the yen/dollar exchange rate during 1980–2015.

Source: IMF, International Financial Statistics. Exchange rates and price levels are end-of-year data.

7The price level measures in Figure 16-2 are index numbers, not dollar amounts. For example, the U.S. consumer price index (CPI) was 100 in the base year 2000 and only about 50 in 1980, so the dollar price of a reference commodity basket of typical U.S. consumption purchases doubled between 1980 and 2000. For Figure 16-2, base years for the U.S. and Japanese price indexes were chosen so that their 1980 ratio would equal the 1980 exchange rate, but this imposed equality does not mean that absolute PPP held in 1980. Although Figure 16-2 uses CPIs, other price indexes lead to similar pictures.

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Studies of other currencies largely confirm the results in Figure 16-2. Relative PPP has not held up well.8 As you will learn later in this book, between the end of World War II in 1945 and the early 1970s, exchange rates were fixed within narrow, internationally agreed- upon margins through the intervention of central banks in the foreign exchange market. During that period of fixed exchange rates, PPP did not do too badly. However, during the first half of the 1920s, when many exchange rates were market-determined as in the 1970s and after, important deviations from relative PPP occurred, just as in recent decades.9 Explaining the Problems with PPP What explains the negative empirical results described in the previous section? There are several immediate problems with our rationale for the PPP theory of exchange rates, which was based on the law of one price: 1. Contrary to the assumption of the law of one price, transport costs and restrictions on trade certainly do exist. These trade barriers may be high enough to prevent some goods and services from being traded between countries. 2. Monopolistic or oligopolistic practices in goods markets may interact with transport costs and other trade barriers to weaken further the link between the prices of similar goods sold in different countries. 3. Because the inflation data reported in different countries are based on different commodity baskets, there is no reason for exchange rate changes to offset official measures of inflation differences, even when there are no barriers to trade and all products are tradable. Trade Barriers and Nontradables Transport costs and governmental trade restrictions make it expensive to move goods between markets located in different countries and therefore weaken the law of one price mechanism underlying PPP. Suppose once again that the same sweater sells for $45 in New York and for £30 in London, but that it costs $2 to ship a sweater between the two cities. At an exchange rate of $1.45 per pound, the dollar price of a London sweater is (+1.45 per pound) * (£30) = +43.50 but an American importer would have to pay +43.50 + +2 = +45.50 to purchase the sweater in London and get it to New York. At an exchange rate of $1.45 per pound, it therefore would not pay to ship sweaters from London to New York even though their dollar price would be higher in the latter loca- tion. Similarly, at an exchange rate of $1.55 per pound, an American exporter would lose money by shipping sweaters from New York to London even though the New York price of $45 would then be below the dollar price of the sweater in London, $46.50. The lesson of this example is that transport costs sever the close link between exchange rates and goods prices implied by the law of one price. The greater the transport costs, the greater the range over which the exchange rate can move, given goods prices in different countries. Official trade restrictions such as tariffs have a similar effect, because a fee paid to the customs inspector affects the importer’s profit in the same way as an equivalent shipping fee. Either type of trade impediment weakens the basis of PPP by allowing the purchasing power of a given currency to differ more widely from country to country. For

8See, for example, the paper by Taylor and Taylor in this chapter’s Further Readings. 9See Paul R. Krugman, “Purchasing Power Parity and Exchange Rates: Another Look at the Evidence,” Journal of International Economics 8 (August 1978), pp. 397–407; Paul De Grauwe, Marc Janssens, and Hilde Leliaert, Real-Exchange-Rate Variability from 1920 to 1926 and 1973 to 1982, Princeton Studies in International Finance 56 (International Finance Section, Department of Economics, Princeton University, September 1985); and Hans Genberg, “Purchasing Power Parity under Fixed and Flexible Exchange Rates,” Journal of International Economics 8 (May 1978), pp. 247–276.

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example, in the presence of trade impediments, a dollar need not go as far in London as in Chicago—and it doesn’t, as anyone who has ever been to London has found out. As you will recall from the theory of international trade, transport costs may be so large relative to the cost of producing some goods and services that those items can never be traded internationally at a profit. Such goods and services are called nontradables. The time-honored classroom example of a nontradable is the haircut. A Frenchman desiring an American haircut would have to transport himself to the United States or transport an American barber to France; in either case, the cost of transport is so large relative to the price of the service being purchased that (tourists excepted) French haircuts are consumed only by residents of France while American haircuts are consumed only by residents of the United States. The existence in all countries of nontraded goods and services, whose prices are not linked internationally, allows systematic deviations even from relative PPP. Because the price of a nontradable is determined entirely by its domestic supply and demand curves, shifts in those curves may cause the domestic price of a broad commodity basket to change relative to the foreign price of the same basket. Other things equal, a rise in the price of a country’s nontradables will raise its price level relative to foreign price levels (measuring all countries’ price levels in terms of a single currency). Looked at another way, the purchasing power of any given currency will fall in countries where the prices of nontradables rise. Each country’s price level includes a wide variety of nontradables, including (along with haircuts) routine medical treatment, dance instruction, and housing, among others. Broadly speaking, we can identify traded goods with manufactured products, raw materials, and agricultural products. Nontradables are primarily services and the outputs of the construction industry. There are, naturally, exceptions to this rule. For example, financial services provided by banks and brokerage houses often can be traded internationally. (The rise of the Internet, in particular, has expanded the range of tradable services.) In addition, trade restrictions, if sufficiently severe, can cause goods that would normally be traded to become nontraded. Thus, in most countries, some manufactures are nontraded. We can get a rough idea of the importance of nontradables in the American economy by looking at the contribution of the service industries to U.S. GNP. In recent years, services have accounted for around 75 percent of the value of U.S. output. While services tend to have smaller shares in poorer economies, nontradables make up an important component of GNP everywhere. Nontradables help explain the wide departures from relative PPP illustrated by Figure 16-2. Departures from Free Competition When trade barriers and imperfectly competitive market structures occur together, linkages between national price levels are weakened further. An extreme case occurs when a single firm sells a commodity for different prices in different markets. When a firm sells the same product for different prices in different markets, we say that it is practicing pricing to market. Pricing to market may reflect different demand conditions in different countries. For example, countries where demand is more price- inelastic will tend to be charged higher markups over a monopolistic seller’s production cost. Empirical studies of firm-level export data have yielded strong evidence of pervasive pricing to market in manufacturing trade.10

10For a detailed review of the evidence, see the paper by Goldberg and Knetter in this chapter’s Further Read- ings. Theoretical contributions on pricing to market include Rudiger Dornbusch, “Exchange Rates and Prices,” American Economic Review 77 (March 1987), pp. 93–106; Paul R. Krugman, “Pricing to Market When the Exchange Rate Changes,” in Sven W. Arndt and J. David Richardson, eds., Real-Financial Linkages among Open Economies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); and Andrew Atkeson and Ariel Burstein, “Pricing-to-Market, Trade Costs, and International Relative Prices,” American Economic Review 98 (December 2008), pp. 1998–2031.

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In 2016, for example, a Volkswagen Polo costed $4,000 more in Ireland than in A ustria despite those countries’ shared currency (the euro) and despite the European Union’s efforts over many years to remove intra-European trade barriers (see Chapter 21). Such price differentials would be difficult to enforce if it were not costly for consumers to buy autos in Austria and drive or ship them to Ireland or if consumers viewed cheaper cars available in Ireland as good substitutes for the Polo. The combination of product differentiation and segmented markets, however, leads to large violations of the law of one price and absolute PPP. Shifts in market structure and demand over time can invalidate relative PPP.

Differences in Consumption Patterns and Price Level Measurement Government measures of the price level differ from country to country. One reason for these differences is that people living in different countries spend their incomes in different ways. In general, people consume relatively higher proportions of their own country’s products—including its tradable products—than of foreign-made products. The average Norwegian consumes more reindeer meat than her American counterpart, the average Japanese more sushi, and the average Indian more chutney. In constructing a reference commodity basket to measure purchasing power, it is therefore likely that the Norwegian government will put a relatively high weight on reindeer, the Japanese government a high weight on sushi, and the Indian government a high weight on chutney. Because relative PPP makes predictions about price changes rather than price levels, it is a sensible concept regardless of the baskets used to define price levels in the countries being compared. If all U.S. prices increase by 10 percent and the dollar

Measuring and Comparing Countries’ Wealth Worldwide: the International Comparison Program (ICP)

f you want to compute reliable purchasing power globally determined by the law of one price, the Iparities (PPPs), you need data on the local prices prices of nontraded products (buildings, health, of a large number of goods and services consumed education, government services, etc.) are influ- in an economy and compare it with that of other enced by domestic factors, especially wages and countries. Collecting and organization such data salaries, which are usually higher in high-income would obviously be quite challenging. countries. One of the primary challenges in calculating The International Comparison Program PPP is the inadequacy of using exchange rates. (ICP) was set up as a research effort in the 1960s While exchange rates can be used to express GDPs in an effort to provide PPP data to policymak- in a common currency, they do not factor in the ers and international organizations. Hosted by relative purchasing power of currencies because the World Bank, the ICP Global Office works they are determined by demand and supply of cur- with the United Nations Regional Commis- rencies and are influences by interest rates, capital sions, the OECD, Eurostat, and regional devel- flows, government intervention, currency specula- opment banks. It has also established regional tion, etc. For this reason, exchange rates do not ICP offices, which collect and validate data. The value GDPs at a common price level. ICP uses PPP to offer comparability among Another challenge is the determination of GDP figures and their components by calculat- the prices of traded and nontraded commodi- ing national data using a common price level as ties. While the prices of traded products can be base and expressing it in a common currency.

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Many major international agencies, such as the Comparable data for commodities under the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the second and third categories may be too difficult World Health Organization, the United Nations or expensive to obtain and is usually beyond the Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization scope of data collected through market surveys. and the United Nations Development Program Once all commodities have been placed into (UNDP), the OECD, the European Union, as well a category, PPPs are calculated and compared as domestic policymakers and other stakeholders at the individual product level for each basic use ICP data to compare GDP, growth rates, and heading for every pair of economies. On the poverty levels across countries. other hand, multilateral PPPs are calculated on the basis of transitivity and country invariance. Methodology Transitivity occurs when the PPP between two countries is the same, irrespective of whether it The ICP conducts worldwide surveys every six is calculated directly or through another coun- years to collect data on prices and expenditure on try. Country invariance occurs when the PPP the entire set of final goods and services that con- between two countries is the same irrespective stitute the final expenditure on GDP. of the base country. There are two ways in which price level dif- The last survey of the ICP, ICP 2011 Purchas- ferences across economies are reconciled: either ing Power Parities and the Real Size of World by directly observing volumes or by using rela- Economies, was published on October 28, 2014. tive prices to derive the volumes. PPPs are then It includes 199 countries from seven (plus one calculated in two stages. In the first stage, PPPs statistical area) world regions after several years are estimated for individual goods and services, of intense work (the previous one is called ICP which account for the difference in price levels 2005). for traded products and nontraded products. In the second stage, PPPs are estimated for groups World GDP of products. Finally, the various levels are aggre- gated to make up the GDP. The composition of The report found that, compared to real expendi- the baskets of good and services to compare tures in ICR 2005 PPPs, the share of low and mid- purchasing powers across economies varies and dle income economies (developing countries) has reflects differences in preferences, cultures, cli- now increased to about half of the world’s GDP. mates, prices, product availability, incomes, etc., The following figure shows the distribution of but each basket will effectively provide compara- global GDP by ICP region and compares their ble or equivalent utility or consumer satisfaction. shares based on PPP to those based on exchange GDP is first broken down into 155 basic rates. According to the PPP-based distribution, headings. These basic headings are the lowest while the Asia and the Pacific regions accounted level at which expenditure estimates are required. for over 30 percent of world GDP in 2011, the They are essentially the product groups into Eurostat-OECD region is significantly smaller. which individual goods or services are catego- The report pointed out that while the largest rized for pricing. There are three categories of 12 countries of the world account for two-thirds basic headings: of the global economy and 59 percent of global 1. Commodities purchased by consumers in population, six of these 12 economies are in the various markets middle income category. When PPP is factored, 2. House rents, healthcare, education, govern- the United States remains the largest economy, ment services, and equipment but the GDP shares of China and India, the 3. Commodities for which prices are not second and third largest economies, more than available, such as narcotics doubles relative to the United States since 2005.

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PPP-Based and Exchange 100 Rate–Based GDP Regional 4.5 2.8 0.1 0.1 Shares (World = 100), ICP 5.5 5.3 2011 80 Source: ICP, http://icp.worldbank.org/.

53.7 60 70.1

40 4.8 Percentage of world GDP 3.4 20 30.0 17.9

4.5 0 2.7 Share of GDP Share of GDP (PPP-based) (exchange rate-based)

Western Asia Commonwealth of Caribbean Independent States Latin America Asia and the Paciﬁc Eurostat-OECD Africa

The report also reveals that the consumption measures, the World Health Organization com- is shared differently according to category an pares health inequality across countries, and the economy is placed in. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cul- tural Organization (UNESCO) assesses per capita The International Poverty line expenditure on education by various economies.

In October 2015, the World Bank Group Limitations announced its first updated international poverty line using 2011 PPPs in almost a decade. All data should be treated with caution. The ICP Using the new 2011 PPP data, the updated report comes with the following caveats: $1.90 poverty line can be converted from local cur- Countries with significant non-observed econo- rency into U.S. dollars. The average value of these mies may have an underestimated GDP. For such lines in 2011 is approximately $1.90, which is the reasons, GDP measurement is not uniform across updated international extreme poverty line. all countries. Apart from comparing GDPs and poverty lev- PPPs based on prices of services are not as pre- els on a global level by the IMF and the World cise for those based on prices of services. This is Bank, ICP data is used for several other purposes largely because services such as health and housing by international organizations. For example, the would have greater error components. United Nations Development Program (UNDP) While PPPs represent the overall price level of uses this data to calculate the human develop- an economy, they do not capture differences in ment index and formulate gender empowerment prices within the economy.

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For these reasons, the ICP report estimates an The final caveat is that PPPs should not be error component of plus or minus 15 percent for equated to equilibrium exchange rates because the economies such as China, India, and Brazil, which ICP PPPs do not capture the undervaluation or have significant differences in price and economic overvaluation of currencies.* structures.

*See “Purchasing Power Parities and the Real Size of World Economies: A Comprehensive Report of the 2011 International Comparison Program,” the World Bank Group, ICP 2011, http://sitere- sources.worldbank.org/ICPEXT/Resources/ICP-2011-report.pdf; and Mario Cruz, James Foster, Bryce Quillin, and Philip Schellekens, “Ending Extreme Poverty and Sharing Prosperity: Progress and Policies,” Development Economics, World Bank Group, October 2015, http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/109701443800596288/PRN03Oct2015TwinGoals.pdf.

depreciates against foreign currencies by 10 percent, relative PPP will be satisfied (assuming there are no changes abroad) for any domestic and foreign choices of price level indexes. Change in the relative prices of basket components, however, can cause relative PPP to fail tests that are based on official price indexes. For example, a rise in the relative price of fish would raise the dollar price of a Japanese government reference commodity basket relative to that of a U.S. government basket, simply because fish take up a larger share of the Japanese basket. Relative price changes could lead to PPP violations like those shown in Figure 16-2 even if trade were free and costless.

PPP in the Short Run and in the Long Run The factors we have examined so far in explaining the PPP theory’s poor empirical per- formance can cause national price levels to diverge even in the long run, after all prices have had time to adjust to their market-clearing levels. As we discussed in Chapter 15, however, many prices in the economy are sticky and take time to adjust fully. Depar- tures from PPP may therefore be even greater in the short run than in the long run. An abrupt depreciation of the dollar against foreign currencies, for example, makes farm equipment in the United States cheaper relative to similar equipment produced abroad. As farmers throughout the world shift their demand for tractors and reapers to U.S. producers, the price of American farm equipment tends to rise to reduce the divergence from the law of one price caused by the dollar’s depreciation. It takes time for this process of price increase to be complete, however, and prices for U.S. and foreign farm equipment may differ considerably while markets adjust to the exchange rate change. You might suspect that short-run price stickiness and exchange rate volatility help explain a phenomenon we noted in discussing Figure 16-2—that violations of relative PPP have been much more flagrant over periods when exchange rates have floated. Empirical research supports this interpretation of the data. Figure 15-11, which we used to illustrate the stickiness of goods prices compared with exchange rates, is quite typical of floating-rate episodes. In a careful study covering many countries and historical episodes, economist Michael Mussa compared the extent of short-run deviations from PPP under fixed and floating exchange rates. He found that floating exchange rates systematically lead to much larger and more frequent short-run deviations from

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relative PPP.11 The box on pages 463–466 provides an especially vivid illustration of how price stickiness can generate violations of the law of one price even for absolutely identical goods. Recent research suggests that short-run deviations from PPP such as those due to volatile exchange rates die away over time, with only half the effect of a temporary departure from PPP remaining after four years.12 Even when these temporary PPP deviations are removed from the data, however, it still appears that the cumulative effect of certain long-run trends causes predictable departures from PPP for many countries. The Case Study entitled “Why Price Levels Are Lower in Poorer Countries” discusses one of the major mechanisms behind such trends.

CASE STUDY Why Price Levels Are Lower in Poorer Countries Research on international price level differences has uncovered a striking empirical regularity: When expressed in terms of a single currency, countries’ price levels are positively related to the level of real income per capita. In other words, a dollar, when converted to local currency at the market exchange rate, generally goes much further in a poor country than in a rich one. Figure 16-3 illustrates the relation between price levels and income, with each dot representing a different country. The previous section’s discussion of the role of nontraded goods in the determination of national price levels suggests that international variations in the prices of nontradables may contribute to price level discrepancies between rich and poor nations. The available data indeed show that nontradables tend to be more expensive (relative to tradables) in richer countries. One reason for the lower relative price of nontradables in poor countries was suggested by Bela Balassa and Paul Samuelson.13 The Balassa-Samuelson theory assumes the labor forces of poor countries are less productive than those of rich countries in the tradables sector but international productivity differences in

11See Mussa, “Nominal Exchange Rate Regimes and the Behavior of Real Exchange Rates: Evidence and Implications,” in Karl Brunner and Allan H. Meltzer, eds., Real Business Cycles, Real Exchange Rates and Actual Policies, Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 25 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1986), pp. 117–214. Charles Engel of the University of Wisconsin has found that under a floating exchange rate, international price differences for the same good can be more variable than the relative price of different goods within a single country. See Engel, “Real Exchange Rates and Relative Prices: An Empirical Investiga- tion,” Journal of Monetary Economics 32 (August 1993), pp. 35–50. Also see Gopinath, Gourinchas, Hsieh, and Li, op. cit. (footnote 6). 12See, for example, Jeffrey A. Frankel and Andrew K. Rose, “A Panel Project on Purchasing Power Parity: Mean Reversion within and between Countries,” Journal of International Economics 40 (February 1996), pp. 209–224. The statistical validity of these results is challenged by Paul G. J. O’Connell in “The Overvalu- ation of Purchasing Power Parity,” Journal of International Economics 44 (February 1998), pp. 1–19. 13See Balassa, “The Purchasing Power Parity Doctrine: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Political Economy 72 (December 1964), pp. 584–596; and Samuelson, “Theoretical Notes on Trade Problems,” Review of Eco- nomics and Statistics 46 (May 1964), pp. 145–154. The Balassa-Samuelson theory was foreshadowed by some observations of Ricardo. See Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937), p. 315.

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Price level relative to U.S. (U.S. = 100) 180

160

140

120

100

0 0 10000 20000 30000 40000 50000 60000 70000 PPP Converted GDP Per Capita (Chain Series), at 2005 constant prices

FIGURE 16-3 Price Levels and Real Incomes, 2014 Countries’ price levels tend to rise as their real incomes rise. Each dot represents a country. The straight line indicates a statistician’s best prediction of a country’s price level relative to that of the United States based on knowing its real per capita income.

Source: Penn World Table, version 9.0.

nontradables are negligible. If the prices of traded goods are roughly equal in all countries, however, lower labor productivity in the tradables industries of poor countries implies lower wages than abroad, lower production costs in nontradables, and therefore a lower price of nontradables. Rich countries with higher labor productivity in the tradables sector will tend to have higher nontradables prices and higher price levels. Productivity statistics give some empirical support to the Balassa-Samuelson differential productivity postulate. And it is plausible that international productivity differences are sharper in traded than in nontraded goods. Whether a country is rich or poor, a barber can give only so many haircuts in a week, but there may be a significant scope for productivity differences across countries in the manufacture of traded goods like personal computers. An alternative theory that attempts to explain the lower price levels of poor countries was put forth by Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University, and by Irving Kravis of the University of Pennsylvania and Robert Lipsey of the City University

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of New York.14 The Bhagwati-Kravis-Lipsey view relies on differences in endow- ments of capital and labor rather than productivity differences, but it also predicts that the relative price of nontradables increases as real per capita income increases. Rich countries have high capital-labor ratios, while poor countries have more labor relative to capital. Because rich countries have higher capital-labor ratios, the marginal productivity of labor is greater in rich countries than in poor countries, and the former will therefore have a higher wage level than the latter.15 Nontradables, which consist largely of services, are naturally labor-intensive relative to tradables. Because labor is cheaper in poor countries and is used intensively in producing nontradables, nontradables also will be cheaper there than in the rich, high-wage countries. Once again, this international difference in the relative price of nontradables suggests that overall price levels, when measured in a single currency, should be higher in rich countries than in poor countries.

Beyond Purchasing Power Parity: A General Model of Long-Run Exchange Rates Why devote so much discussion to the purchasing power parity theory when it is fraught with exceptions and apparently contradicted by the data? We examined the implications of PPP so closely because its basic idea of relating long-run exchange rates to long-run national price levels is a very useful starting point. The monetary approach presented previously, which assumed PPP, is too simple to give accurate predictions about the real world, but we can generalize it by taking account of some of the reasons why PPP predicts badly in practice. In this section, we do just that. The long-run analysis below continues to ignore short-run complications caused by sticky prices. An understanding of how exchange rates behave in the long run is, as mentioned earlier, a prerequisite for the more complicated short-run analysis that we undertake in the next chapter.

The Real Exchange Rate As the first step in extending the PPP theory, we define the concept of a real exchange rate. The real exchange rate between two countries’ currencies is a broad summary measure of the prices of one country’s goods and services relative to the other country’s. It is natural to introduce the real exchange rate concept at this point because the major prediction of PPP is that real exchange rates never change, at least not permanently. To extend our model so that it describes the world more accurately, we need to examine systematically the forces that can cause dramatic and permanent changes in real exchange rates. As we will see, real exchange rates are important not only for quantifying deviations from PPP but also for analyzing macroeconomic demand and supply conditions

14See Irving B. Kravis and Robert E. Lipsey, Toward an Explanation of National Price Levels, Princeton Studies in International Finance 52 (International Finance Section, Department of Economics, Princeton University, November 1983); and Jagdish N. Bhagwati, “Why Are Services Cheaper in the Poor Countries?” Economic Journal 94 (June 1984), pp. 279–286. 15This argument assumes that factor endowment differences between rich and poor countries are sufficiently great that factor-price equalization cannot hold.

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in open economies. When we wish to differentiate a real exchange rate—which is the relative price of two output baskets—from a relative price of two currencies, we will refer to the latter as a nominal exchange rate. But when there is no risk of confusion, we will continue to use the shorter term, exchange rate, to refer to nominal exchange rates. Real exchange rates are defined in terms of nominal exchange rates and price levels. Before we can give a more precise definition of real exchange rates, however, we need to clarify the price level measure we will be using. Let PUS, as usual, be the price level in the United States, and PE the price level in Europe. Since we will not be assuming absolute PPP (as we did in our discussion of the monetary approach), we no longer assume the price level can be measured by the same basket of commodities in the United States as in Europe. Because we will soon want to link our analysis to monetary factors, we require instead that each country’s price index give a good representation of the purchases that motivate its residents to demand its money supply. No measure of the price level does this perfectly, but we must settle on some definition before we can formally define the real exchange rate. To be concrete, you can think of PUS as the dollar price of an unchanging basket containing the typical weekly purchases of U.S. households and firms; PE, similarly, is based on an unchanging basket reflecting the typical weekly purchases of European households and firms. The point to remember is that the U.S. price level will place a relatively heavy weight on commodities produced and consumed in America, and the European price level a relatively heavy weight on commodities produced and consumed in Europe.16 Having described the reference commodity baskets used to measure price levels, we now formally define the real dollar/euro exchange rate, denoted q+ :, as the dollar price of the European basket relative to that of the American basket.> We can express the real exchange rate as the dollar value of Europe’s price level divided by the U.S. price level or, in symbols, as

q+ : = (E+ : * PE) PUS. (16-6) A numerical example will clarify> the concept> of> the real exchange rate. Imagine the European reference commodity basket costs €100 (so that PE = :100 per European basket), the U.S. basket costs $120 (so that PUS = +120 per U.S. basket), and the nominal exchange rate is E+ : = +1.20 per euro. The real dollar/euro exchange rate would then be > (+1.20 per euro) * (:100 per European basket) q+ = : (+120 per U.S. basket) > = (+120 per European basket) (+120 per U.S. basket) = 1 U.S. basket per European >basket.

A rise in the real dollar/euro exchange rate q+ : (which we call a real depreciation of the dollar against the euro) can be thought of> in several equivalent ways. Most obviously, (16-6) shows this change to be a fall in the purchasing power of a dollar within Europe’s borders relative to its purchasing power within the United States. This change in relative purchasing power occurs because the dollar prices of European goods (E+ : * PE) rise relative to those of U.S. goods (PUS). In terms> of our numerical example, a 10 percent nominal dollar depreciation, to E+ : = +1.32 per euro, causes q+ : to rise to 1.1 U.S. baskets per European basket, a real> dollar depreciation of 10 percent> against the euro. (The same change in q+ : could result from a 10 percent rise in PE or a 10 percent fall in PUS.) The real depreciation>

16Nontradables are one important factor behind the relative preference for home products.

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means the dollar’s purchasing power over European goods and services falls by 10 percent relative to its purchasing power over U.S. goods and services. Alternatively, even though many of the items entering national price levels are nontraded, it is useful to think of the real exchange rate q+ : as the relative price of European products in general in terms of American products,> that is, the price at which hypothetical trades of American for European commodity baskets would occur if trades at domestic prices were possible. The dollar is considered to depreciate in real terms against the euro when q+ : rises because the hypothetical purchasing power of America’s products in general over> Europe’s declines. America’s goods and services thus become cheaper relative to Europe’s. A real appreciation of the dollar against the euro is a fall in q+ :. This fall indicates a decrease in the relative price of products purchased in Europe, or> a rise in the dollar’s European purchasing power compared with that in the United States.17 Our convention for describing real depreciations and appreciations of the dollar against the euro is the same one we use for nominal exchange rates (that is, E+ : up is a dollar depreciation, E+ : down is an appreciation). Equation (16-6) shows that> at unchanged output prices, nominal> depreciation (appreciation) implies real depreciation (appreciation). Our discussion of real exchange rate changes thus includes, as a special case, an observation we made in Chapter 14: With the domestic money prices of goods held constant, a nominal dollar depreciation makes U.S. goods cheaper compared with foreign goods, while a nominal dollar appreciation makes them more expensive. Equation (16-6) makes it easy to see why the real exchange rate can never change when relative PPP holds. Under relative PPP, a 10 percent rise in E+ :, for instance, would always be exactly offset by a 10 percent fall in the price level ratio> PE PUS, leaving q+ unchanged. : > > Demand, Supply, and the Long-Run Real Exchange Rate It should come as no surprise that in a world where PPP does not hold, the long-run values of real exchange rates—just like other relative prices that clear markets—depend on demand and supply conditions. Since a real exchange rate tracks changes in the relative price of two countries’ expenditure baskets, however, conditions in both countries matter. Changes in countries’ output markets can be complex, and we do not want to digress into an exhaustive (and exhausting) catalogue of the possibilities. We focus instead on two specific cases that are both easy to grasp and important in practice for explaining why the long-run values of real exchange rates can change. 1. A change in world relative demand for American products. Imagine total world spending on American goods and services rises relative to total world spending on European goods and services. Such a change could arise from several sources—for example, a shift in private U.S. demand away from European goods and toward American goods; a similar shift in private foreign demand toward American goods; or an increase in U.S. government demand falling primarily on U.S. output. Any increase in relative world demand for U.S. products causes an excess demand for them at the previous real exchange rate. To restore equilibrium, the relative price of American output in terms of European output will therefore have to rise: The relative prices of U.S. nontradables will rise, and the prices of tradables produced

17 This is true because E+ : = 1 E: +, implying that a real depreciation of the dollar against the euro is the same as a real appreciation of the euro against the dollar (that is, a rise in the purchasing power of the euro > > > within the United States relative to its purchasing power within Europe, or a fall in the relative price of American products in terms of European products).

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STICKY PRICES AND THE LAW OF ONE PRICE: EVIDENCE FROM SCANDINAVIAN DUTY-FREE SHOPS

ticky nominal prices and wages are central to reissued with revised prices only from time to time. In Smacroeconomic theories, but just why might it be the interim, however, fluctuations in exchange rates difficult for money prices to change from day to day induce multiple, changing prices for the same good. as market conditions change? One reason is based on For example, on the Birka Line of ferries between the idea of “menu costs.” Menu costs could arise from Sweden and Finland, prices were listed in both Finn- several factors, such as the actual costs of printing ish markka and Swedish kronor between 1975 and new price lists and catalogs. In addition, firms may 1998, implying that a relative depreciation of the perceive a different type of menu cost due to their markka would make it cheaper to buy cigarettes or customers’ imperfect information about competitors’ vodka by paying markka rather than kronor. prices. When a firm raises its price, some customers Despite such price discrepancies, Birka Line will shop around elsewhere and find it convenient to was always able to do business in both curren- remain with a competing seller even if all sellers have cies—passengers did not rush to buy at the low- raised their prices. In the presence of these various est price. Swedish passengers, who held relatively types of menu costs, sellers will often hold prices con- large quantities of their own national currency, stant after a change in market conditions until they tended to buy at the krona prices, whereas Finn- are certain the change is permanent enough to make ish customers tended to buy at the markka prices. incurring the costs of price changes worthwhile.* Often, Birka Line would take advantage of pub- If there were truly no barriers between two lishing a new catalog to reduce deviations from the markets with goods priced in different currencies, law of one price. The average deviation from the law sticky prices would be unable to survive in the face of one price in the month just before such a price of an exchange rate change. All buyers would sim- adjustment was 7.21 percent, but only 2.22 per- ply flock to the market where a good had become cent in the month of the price adjustment. One big cheapest. But when some trade impediments exist, impediment to taking advantage of the arbitrage deviations from the law of one price do not induce opportunities was the cost of changing currencies unlimited arbitrage, so it is feasible for sellers to at the onboard foreign exchange booth—roughly hold prices constant despite exchange rate changes. 7.5 percent. That transaction cost, given different In the real world, trade barriers appear to be sig- passengers’ currency preferences at the time of nificant, widespread, and often subtle in nature. embarkation, acted as an effective trade barrier.‡ Apparently, arbitrage between two markets may Surprisingly, Birka Line did not completely be limited even when the physical distance between eliminate law of one price deviations when it them is zero, as a surprising study of pricing behav- changed catalog prices. Instead, Birka Line prac- ior in Scandinavian duty-free outlets shows. Swedish ticed a kind of pricing to market on its ferries. economists Marcus Asplund and Richard Friberg Usually, exporters who price to market discrimi- studied pricing behavior in the duty-free stores of nate among different consumers based on their two Scandinavian ferry lines whose catalogs quote different locations, but Birka was able to discrimi- the prices of each good in several currencies for nate based on different nationality and currency the convenience of customers from different coun- preferences, even with all potential consumers tries.† Since it is costly to print the catalogs, they are located on the same ferry boat.

*It is when economic conditions are very volatile that prices seem to become most flexible. For example, restaurant menus will typically price their catch of the day at “market” so that the price charged (and the fish offered) can reflect the high variability in fishing outcomes. †“The Law of One Price in Scandinavian Duty-Free Stores,” American Economic Review 91 (September 2001), pp. 1072–1083. ‡Customers could pay in the currency of their choice not only with cash, but also with credit cards, which involve lower foreign exchange conversion fees but convert at an exchange rate prevailing a few days after the purchase of the goods. Asplund and Friberg suggest that for such small purchases, uncertainty and the costs of calculating relative prices (in addition to the credit-card exchange fees) might have been a sufficient deterrent to transacting in a relatively unfamiliar currency.

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in the United States, and consumed intensively there, will rise relative to the prices of tradables made in Europe. These changes all work to reduce q+ :, the relative price of Europe’s reference expenditure basket in terms of the United> States’. We conclude that an increase in world relative demand for U.S. output causes a long- run real appreciation of the dollar against the euro (a fall in q+ :). Similarly, a decrease in world relative demand for U.S. output causes a long-run> real depreciation of the dollar against the euro (a rise in q+ :). 2. A change in relative output supply. Suppose the productive> efficiency of U.S. labor and capital rises. Since Americans spend part of their increased income on foreign goods, the supplies of all types of U.S. goods and services increase relative to the demand for them, the result being an excess relative supply of American output at the previous real exchange rate. A fall in the relative price of American products—both nontradables and tradables—shifts demand toward them and eliminates the excess supply. This price change is a real depreciation of the dollar against the euro, that is, an increase in q+ :. A relative expansion of U.S. output causes a long-run real depreciation of the dollar >against the euro (q+ : rises). A relative expansion of European output 18 causes a long-run real appreciation> of the dollar against the euro (q+ : falls). A useful diagram summarizes our discussion of demand, supply, >and the long-run real exchange rate. In Figure 16-4, the supply of U.S. output relative to European

FIGURE 16-4 Real exchange Determination of rate, q$/ the Long-Run Real : Exchange Rate RS RD The long-run equilibrium real exchange rate equates world relative demand to the full- employment level of relative supply. q1 $/: 1

Ratio of U.S. to European real 1 output (Y /Y ) (YUS/YE) US E

18Our discussion of the Balassa-Samuelson effect in the Case Study on pages 467–469 would lead you to expect that a productivity increase concentrated in the U.S. tradables sector might cause the dollar to appreciate, rather than depreciate, in real terms against the euro. In the last paragraph, however, we have in mind a balanced productivity increase that benefits the traded and nontraded sectors in equal proportion, thus resulting in a real dollar depreciation by causing a drop in the prices of nontraded goods and in those of traded goods that are more important in America’s consumer price index than in Europe’s.

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output, YUS YE, is plotted along the horizontal axis while the real dollar/euro exchange rate, q+ , is plotted along the vertical axis. : > The >equilibrium real exchange rate is determined by the intersection of two schedules. The upward-sloping schedule RD shows that the relative demand for U.S. products in general, relative to the demand for European products, rises as q+ : rises, that is, as American products become relatively cheaper. This “demand” curve> for U.S. relative to European goods has a positive slope because we are measuring a fall in the relative price of U.S. goods by a move upward along the vertical axis. What about relative supply? In the long run, relative national output levels are determined by factor supplies and productivity, with little, if any, effect on the real exchange rate. The relative supply curve, RS, therefore is vertical at the long-run (that is, full-employment) relative output 1 ratio, (YUS YE) . The equilibrium long-run real exchange rate is the one that sets relative demand equal to long-run relative supply (point 1).19 The diagram> easily illustrates how changes in world markets affect the real exchange rate. Suppose world gasoline prices fall, making American sport-utility vehicles more desirable for people everywhere. This change would be a rise in world relative demand for American goods and would shift RD to the right, causing q+ : to fall (a real dollar appreciation against the euro). Suppose the United States improves> its health-care system, reducing illness throughout the American workforce. If workers are able to produce more goods and services in an hour as a result, the rise in U.S. productivity shifts RS to the right, causing q+ : to rise (a real dollar depreciation against the euro). > Nominal and Real Exchange Rates in Long-Run Equilibrium We now pull together what we have learned in this chapter and Chapter 15 to show how long-run nominal exchange rates are determined. One central conclusion is that changes in national money supplies and demands give rise to the proportional long-run movements in nominal exchange rates and international price level ratios predicted by the relative purchasing power parity theory. Demand and supply shifts in national output markets, however, cause nominal exchange rate movements that do not conform to PPP. Recall our definition of the real dollar/euro exchange rate as

q+ : = (E+ : * PE) PUS. [See equation (16-6).] If we now >solve this> equation> for the nominal exchange rate, we get an equation that gives us the nominal dollar/euro exchange rate as the real dollar/ euro exchange rate times the U.S.–Europe price level ratio:

E+ : = q+ : * (PUS PE). (16-7) Formally speaking, the only difference> between> (16-7)> and equation (16-1), on which we based our exposition of the monetary approach to the exchange rate, is that (16-7) accounts for possible deviations from PPP by adding the real exchange rate as an additional determinant of the nominal exchange rate. The equation implies that for a given real dollar/euro exchange rate, changes in money demand or supply in Europe or the United States affect the long-run nominal dollar/euro exchange rate as in the monetary approach. Changes in the long-run real exchange rate, however, also affect the long-run nominal exchange rate. The long-run theory of exchange rate determination implied

19Notice that these RD and RS schedules differ from the ones used in Chapter 6. The earlier ones referred to relative world demand for and supply of two products that could be produced in either of two countries. In contrast, the RD and RS curves in this chapter refer to the relative world demand for and supply of one country’s overall output (its GDP) relative to another’s.

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by equation (16-7) thus includes the valid elements of the monetary approach, but in addition it corrects the monetary approach by allowing for nonmonetary factors that can cause sustained deviations from purchasing power parity. Assuming all variables start out at their long-run levels, we can now understand the most important determinants of long-run swings in nominal exchange rates: 1. A shift in relative money supply levels. Suppose the Fed wishes to stimulate the economy and therefore carries out an increase in the level of the U.S. money supply. As you will remember from Chapter 15, a permanent, one-time increase in a country’s money supply has no effect on the long-run levels of output, the interest rate, or any relative price (including the real exchange rate). Thus, (16-3) implies once again that PUS rises in proportion to MUS, while (16-7) shows that the U.S. price level is the sole variable changing in the long run along with the nominal exchange rate E+ :. Because the real exchange rate q+ : does not change, the nominal exchange rate> change is consistent with relative PPP:> The only long-run effect of the U.S. money supply increase is to raise all dollar prices, including the dollar price of the euro, in proportion to the increase in the money supply. It should be no surprise that this result is the same as the one we found using the monetary approach, since that approach is designed to account for the long-run effects of monetary changes. 2. A shift in relative money supply growth rates. Suppose the Fed concludes, to its dis- may, that over the next few years the U.S. price level will fall. (A consistently falling price level is called deflation.) A permanent increase in the growth rate of the U.S. money supply raises the long-run U.S. inflation rate and, through the Fisher effect, raises the dollar interest rate relative to the euro interest rate. Because relative U.S. real money demand therefore declines, equation (16-3) implies that PUS rises (as shown in Figure 16-1). Because the change bringing this outcome about is purely monetary, however, it is neutral in its long-run effects; specifically, it does not alter the long-run real dollar/euro exchange rate. According to (16-7), then, E+ : rises in proportion to the increase in PUS (a depreciation of the dollar against the> euro). Once again, a purely monetary change brings about a long-run nominal exchange rate shift in line with relative PPP, just as the monetary approach predicted. 3. A change in relative output demand. This type of change is not covered by the monetary approach, so now the more general perspective we’ve developed, in which the real exchange rate can change, is essential. Since a change in relative output demand does not affect long-run national price levels—these depend solely on the factors appearing in equations (16-3) and (16-4)—the long-run nominal exchange rate in (16-7) will change only insofar as the real exchange rate changes. Consider an increase in world relative demand for U.S. products. Earlier in this section, we saw that a rise in demand for U.S. products causes a long-run real appreciation of the dollar against the euro (a fall in q+ :); this change is simply a rise in the relative price of U.S. output. Given that long-run> national price levels are unchanged, however, (16-7) tells us that a long-run nominal appreciation of the dollar against the euro (a fall in E+ :) must also occur. This prediction highlights the important fact that even though> exchange rates are nominal prices, they respond to nonmonetary as well as monetary events, even over long horizons. 4. A change in relative output supply. As we saw earlier in this section, an increase in relative U.S. output supply causes the dollar to depreciate in real terms against the euro, lowering the relative price of U.S. output. This rise in q+ : is not, however, the only change in equation (16-7) implied by a relative rise in U.S.> output. In addition, the U.S. output increase raises the transaction demand for real U.S. money balances, raising aggregate U.S. real money demand and, by (16-3), pushing the long-run U.S.

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TABLE 16-1 Effects of Money Market and Output Market Changes

on the Long-Run Nominal Dollar/Euro Exchange Rate, E$ @ Effect on the Long-Run Nominal> Change Dollar/Euro Exchange Rate, E+ : Money market > 1. Increase in U.S. money supply level Proportional increase (nominal depreciation of $) 2. Increase in European money supply level Proportional decrease (nominal depreciation of euro) 3. Increase in U.S. money supply growth rate Increase (nominal depreciation of $) 4. Increase in European money supply growth Decrease (nominal depreciation rate of euro) Output market 1. Increase in demand for U.S. output Decrease (nominal appreciation of $) 2. Increase in demand for European output Increase (nominal appreciation of euro) 3. Output supply increase in the United States Ambiguous 4. Output supply increase in Europe Ambiguous

price level down. Referring back to equation (16-7), you will see that since q+ : rises while PUS falls, the output and money market effects of a change in output >supply work in opposite directions, thus making the net effect on E+ : ambiguous. Our analysis of an output-supply change illustrates that even when a> disturbance origi- nates in a single market (in this case, the output market), its influence on exchange rates may depend on repercussion effects that are channeled through other markets. We conclude that when all disturbances are monetary in nature, exchange rates obey relative PPP in the long run. In the long run, a monetary disturbance affects only the general purchasing power of a currency, and this change in purchasing power changes equally the currency’s value in terms of domestic and foreign goods. When disturbances occur in output markets, the exchange rate is unlikely to obey relative PPP, even in the long run. Table 16-1 summarizes these conclusions regarding the effects of monetary and output market changes on long-run nominal exchange rates. In the chapters that follow, we will appeal to this section’s general long-run exchange rate model even when we are discussing short-run macroeconomic events. Long-run factors are important in the short run because of the central role that expectations about the future play in the day-to-day determination of exchange rates. That is why news about the current account, for example, can have a big impact on the exchange rate. The long-run exchange rate model of this section will provide the anchor for market expectations, that is, the framework market participants use to forecast future exchange rates on the basis of information at hand today.

International Interest Rate Differences and the Real Exchange Rate Earlier in this chapter, we saw that relative PPP, when combined with interest parity, implies that international interest rate differences equal differences in countries’ expected inflation rates. Because relative PPP does not hold true in general, however,

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the relation between international interest rate differences and national inflation rates is likely to be more complex in practice than that simple formula suggests. Despite this complexity, economic policy makers who hope to influence exchange rates, as well as private individuals who wish to forecast them, cannot succeed without understanding the factors that cause countries’ interest rates to differ. In this section, we therefore extend our earlier discussion of the Fisher effect to include real exchange rate movements. We do this by showing that in general, interest rate differences between countries depend not only on differences in expected inflation, as the monetary approach asserts, but also on expected changes in the real exchange rate. We begin by recalling that the change in q+ :, the real dollar/euro exchange rate, is the deviation from relative PPP; that is, the change> in q+ : is the percentage change in the nominal dollar/euro exchange rate less the international> difference in inflation rates between the United States and Europe. We thus arrive at the corresponding relationship among the expected change in the real exchange rate, the expected change in the nominal rate, and expected inflation:

e e e e (q+ : - q+ :) q+ : = [(E+ : - E+ :) E+ :] - (pUS - pE), (16-8)

e > > > > > > where q+ : (as per our usual> notation) is the real >exchange rate expected for a year from today.> Now we return to the interest parity condition between dollar and euro deposits, e R+ - R: = (E+ : - E+ :) E+ :. An easy rearrangement of (16-8) shows the> expected> > rate> of change in the nominal dollar/euro exchange rate is just the expected rate of change in the real dollar/euro exchange rate plus the U.S.–Europe expected inflation difference. Combining (16-8) with the above interest parity condition, we thus are led to the following breakdown of the international interest rate gap:

e e e R+ - R: = [(q+ : - q+ :) q+ :] + (pUS - pE). (16-9)

> > > e Notice that when the market expects relative> PPP to prevail, q+ : = q+ : and the first term on the right side of this equation drops out. In this special case,> (16-9)> reduces to the simpler (16-5), which we derived by assuming relative PPP. In general, however, the dollar/euro interest difference is the sum of two components: (1) the expected rate of real dollar depreciation against the euro and (2) the expected inflation difference between the United States and Europe. For example, if U.S. inflation will be 5 percent per year forever and European inflation will be zero forever, the long-run interest difference between dollar and euro deposits need not be the 5 percent that PPP (when combined with interest parity) would suggest. If, in addition, everyone knows that output demand and supply trends will make the dollar depreciate against the euro in real terms at a rate of 1 percent per year, the international interest spread will actually be 6 percent.

Real Interest Parity Economics makes an important distinction between nominal interest rates, which are rates of return measured in monetary terms, and real interest rates, which are rates of return measured in real terms, that is, in terms of a country’s output. Because real rates of return often are uncertain, we usually will refer to expected real interest rates. The interest rates we discussed in connection with the interest parity condition and the

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determinants of money demand were nominal rates, for example, the dollar return on dollar deposits. But for many other purposes, economists need to analyze behavior in terms of real rates of return. No one who is thinking of investing money, for example, could make a decision knowing only that the nominal interest rate is 15 percent. The investment would be quite attractive at zero inflation, but disastrously unattractive if inflation were bounding along at 100 percent per year!20 We conclude this chapter by showing that when the nominal interest parity condition equates nominal interest rate differences between currencies to expected changes in nominal exchange rates, a real interest parity condition equates expected real interest rate differences to expected changes in real exchange rates. Only when relative PPP is expected to hold (meaning no real exchange rate change is anticipated) are expected real interest rates in all countries identical. The expected real interest rate, denoted re, is defined as the nominal interest rate, R, less the expected inflation rate, pe: re = R - pe. In other words, the expected real interest rate in a country is just the real rate of return a domestic resident expects to earn on a loan of his or her currency. The definition of the expected real interest rate clarifies the generality of the forces behind the Fisher effect: Any increase in the expected inflation rate that does not alter the expected real interest rate must be reflected, one for one, in the nominal interest rate. A useful consequence of the preceding definition is a formula for the difference in expected real interest rates between two currency areas such as the United States and Europe: e e e e rUS - rE = (R+ - pUS) - (R: - pE). If we rearrange equation (16-9) and combine it with the equation above, we get the desired real interest parity condition: e e e rUS - rE = (q+ : - q+ :) q+ :. (16-10) Equation (16-10) looks much like the nominal> interest> > parity> condition from which it is derived, but it explains differences in expected real interest rates between the United States and Europe by expected movements in the dollar/euro real exchange rate. Expected real interest rates are the same in different countries when relative PPP is e e expected to hold [in which case (16-10) implies that rUS = rE]. More generally, however, expected real interest rates in different countries need not be equal, even in the long run, if continuing change in output markets is expected.21 Suppose, for example, that productivity in the South Korean tradables sector is expected to rise during the next two decades, while productivity stagnates in South Korean nontradables and in all U.S. industries. If the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis is valid, people should expect the U.S. dollar to depreciate in real terms against South Korea’s currency, the won, as the prices of South Korea’s nontradables trend upward. Equation (16-10) thus implies that the expected real interest rate should be higher in the United States than in South Korea.

20We could get away with examining nominal return differences in the foreign exchange market because (as Chapter 14 showed) nominal return differences equal real return differences for any given investor. In the context of the demand for money, the nominal interest rate is the real rate of return you sacrifice by holding interest-barren currency. 21In the two-period analysis of international borrowing and lending in Chapter 6, all countries face a single worldwide real interest rate. Relative PPP must hold in that analysis, however, because there is only one consumption good in each period.

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Do such real interest differences imply unnoticed profit opportunities for international investors? Not necessarily. A cross-border real interest difference does imply that residents of two countries perceive different real rates of return on wealth. Nominal interest parity tells us, however, that any given investor expects the same real return on domestic and foreign currency assets. Two investors residing in different countries need not calculate this single real rate of return in the same way if relative PPP does not link the prices of their consumption baskets, but there is no way either can profit from their disagreement by shifting funds between currencies.

SUMMARY

1. The purchasing power parity theory, in its absolute form, asserts that the exchange rate between countries’ currencies equals the ratio of their price levels, as measured by the money prices of a reference commodity basket. An equivalent statement of PPP is that the purchasing power of any currency is the same in any country. Absolute PPP implies a second version of the PPP theory, relative PPP, which predicts that percentage changes in exchange rates equal differences in national inflation rates. 2. A building block of the PPP theory is the law of one price, which states that under free competition and in the absence of trade impediments, a good must sell for a single price regardless of where in the world it is sold. Proponents of the PPP theory often argue, however, that its validity does not require the law of one price to hold for every commodity. 3. The monetary approach to the exchange rate uses PPP to explain long-term exchange rate behavior exclusively in terms of money supply and demand. In that theory, long-run international interest differentials result from different national rates of ongoing inflation, as the Fisher effect predicts. Sustained international differences in monetary growth rates are, in turn, behind different long-term rates of continuing inflation. The monetary approach thus finds that a rise in a country’s interest rate will be associated with a depreciation of its currency. Relative PPP implies that international interest differences, which equal the expected percentage change in the exchange rate, also equal the international expected inflation gap. 4. The empirical support for PPP and the law of one price is weak in recent data. The failure of these propositions in the real world is related to trade barriers and departures from free competition, factors that can result in pricing to market by exporters. In addition, different definitions of price levels in different countries bedevil attempts to test PPP using the price indices governments publish. For some products, including many services, international transport costs are so steep that these products become nontradable. 5. Deviations from relative PPP can be viewed as changes in a country’s real exchange rate, the price of a typical foreign expenditure basket in terms of the typical domestic expenditure basket. All else equal, a country’s currency undergoes a long-run real appreciation against foreign currencies when the world relative demand for its output rises. In this case, the country’s real exchange rate, as just defined, falls. The home currency undergoes a long-run real depreciation against foreign currencies when home output expands relative to foreign output. In this case, the real exchange rate rises. 6. The long-run determination of nominal exchange rates can be analyzed by combining two theories: the theory of the long-run real exchange rate and the theory of how domestic monetary factors determine long-run price levels. A stepwise

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increase in a country’s money stock ultimately leads to a proportional increase in its price level and a proportional fall in its currency’s foreign exchange value, just as relative PPP predicts. Changes in monetary growth rates also have long-run effects consistent with PPP. Supply or demand changes in output markets, however, result in exchange rate movements that do not conform to PPP. 7. The interest parity condition equates international differences in nominal interest rates to the expected percentage change in the nominal exchange rate. If interest parity holds in this sense, a real interest parity condition equates international differences in expected real interest rates to the expected change in the real exchange rate. Real interest parity also implies that international differences in nominal interest rates equal the difference in expected inflation plus the expected percentage change in the real exchange rate.

KEY TERMS

absolute PPP, p. 452 nominal exchange rate, p. 470 real appreciation, p. 471 Fisher effect, p. 456 nominal interest rate, p. 477 real depreciation, p. 470 law of one price, p. 450 pricing to market, p. 462 real exchange rate, p. 469 monetary approach to the purchasing power parity real interest rate, p. 477 exchange rate, p. 453 (PPP), p. 449 relative PPP, p. 452

PROBLEMS Pearson MyLab Economics

1. Suppose Russia’s inflation rate is 100 percent over one year but the inflation rate in Switzerland is only 5 percent. According to relative PPP, what should happen over the year to the Swiss franc’s exchange rate against the Russian ruble? 2. Discuss why it is often asserted that exporters suffer when their home currencies appreciate in real terms against foreign currencies and prosper when their home currencies depreciate in real terms. 3. Other things equal, how would you expect the following shifts to affect a currency’s real exchange rate against foreign currencies? a. The overall level of spending doesn’t change, but domestic residents decide to spend more of their income on nontraded products and less on tradables. b. Foreign residents shift their demand away from their own goods and toward the home country’s exports. 4. The Eurozone was created in 1999 with countries including Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and Ireland. New participant countries have joined since—Slo- venia (2007), Cyprus (2008), Malta (2008), Slovakia (2009), Estonia (2011), Latvia (2014), and Lithuania (2015). To become a member of the European Monetary Union the candidate country has to first participate in a “testing phase,” known as the Exchange rate mechanism (ERMII), which lasts for two years; the country also needs to fulfill certain “convergence criteria” like inflation, debt, and exchange rate stability. The central exchange rate chosen between the candidate currency and the euro is based on a range of economic indicators. Comment on this procedure and discuss, according to what is said in this chapter, why the PPP appreciation is not included in the process? 5. The following chart shows the numbers on the average nominal rate (NER) and real exchange rate (REER) of the Japanese Yen against several foreign currencies (such average index numbers are called real effective exchange rates):

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2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 Q3 105.7 107.2 87.1 81.5 76.6 93 NER 101.3 100.0 79.7 75.1 70.3 83.6 REER Base 100 in 2010. Source: http://www.bis.org/statistics/tables_i.pdf Since December 2012, Japan has a new Prime Minister, Shinzō Abe, who has introduced a new economic policy (“the abenomics”) advocating, besides struc- tural reforms, an aggressive monetary easing to foster the economic growth that has been very low for several years. Explain the evolution of the exchange rate of the Yen in this context. 6. At the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles imposed an indemnity on Ger- many, a large annual payment from it to the victorious Allies. (Many historians believe this indemnity played a role in destabilizing financial markets in the interwar period and even in bringing on World War II.) In the 1920s, economists John May- nard Keynes and Bertil Ohlin had a spirited debate in the Economic Journal over the possibility that the transfer payment would impose a “secondary burden” on Germany by worsening its terms of trade. Use the theory developed in this chapter to discuss the mechanisms through which a permanent transfer from Poland to the Czech Republic would affect the real zloty/koruna exchange rate in the long run. 7. Continuing with problem 7, discuss how the transfer would affect the long-run nominal exchange rate between the two currencies. 8. A country imposes a tariff on imports from abroad. How does this action change the long-run real exchange rate between the home and foreign currencies? How is the long-run nominal exchange rate affected? 9. Imagine two identical countries have restricted imports to identical levels, but one has done so using tariffs while the other has done so using quotas. After these policies are in place, both countries experience identical, balanced expansions of domestic spending. Where should the demand expansion cause a greater real currency appreciation, in the tariff-using country or in the quota-using country? 10. Explain how the nominal dollar/euro exchange rate would be affected (all else equal) by permanent changes in the expected rate of real depreciation of the dollar against the euro. 11. Explain how the nominal euro/RMB exchange rate would be affected (all else equal) by permanent changes in the expected rate of real appreciation of the RMB against the euro. 12. Suppose the expected real interest rate in the United States is 9 percent per year while that in Europe is 3 percent per year. What do you expect to happen to the real dollar/euro exchange rate over the next year? 13. Suppose the expected real interest rate in Hong Kong is 5 percent per year while that in Singapore it is 2 percent per year. What do you expect to happen to the real HK$/SNG exchange rate over the next year? 14. Discuss the following statement: “When a change in a country’s nominal interest rate is caused by a rise in the expected real interest rate, the domestic currency appreciates. When the change is caused by a rise in expected inflation, the currency depreciates.” (It may help to refer back to Chapter 15.) 15. Nominal interest rates are quoted at a variety of maturities, corresponding to different lengths of loans. For example, in late 2004 the U.S. government could take out ten-year loans at an annual interest rate of slightly over 4 percent, whereas

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the annual rate it paid on loans of only three months’ duration was slightly under 2 percent. [An annualized interest rate of 2 percent on a three-month loan means that if you borrow a dollar, you repay +1.005 = +1 + (3 12) * +0.02 at the end of three months.] Typically, though not always, long-term interest rates are above short-term rates, as in the preceding example from 2004.> In terms of the Fisher effect, what would that pattern say about expected inflation and/or the expected future real interest rate? 16. In 2006, an ECB report stated that despite an overall increase in euro area long term bond yields, the euro area yield curve flattened during the year. This is mir- rored in the decline of the “term spread,” which is measured by the difference between the yield on a ten-year government bond and a three month EURIBOR. During 2006, there was almost a 50 basis point decline in the term spread, reaching to almost 30 basis points by the end of the year. Typically, long-term interest rates are above short-term rates. In terms of the Fisher effect, what would that pattern say about expected inflation and/or the expected future real interest rate? 17. Between 2002 and 2004, when the 1-year interest rate in the euro zone was 120 basis points higher than the U.S. rate, on average, economists expected a depreciation of the euro based on the interest parity; however, it appreciated by 46 percent against the U.S. How would you explain this deviation from the interest parity? 18. Suppose residents of the United States consume relatively more of U.S. export goods than residents of foreign countries. In other words, U.S. export goods have a higher weight in the U.S. CPI than they do in other countries. Conversely, foreign exports have a lower weight in the U.S. CPI than they do abroad. What would be the effect on the dollar’s real exchange rate of a rise in the U.S. terms of trade (the relative price of U.S. exports in terms of U.S. imports)? 19. Suppose residents of the Euro area consume relatively more of Eurozone countries export goods than residents of foreign countries. In other words, Eurozone countries export goods have a higher weight in the Eurozone HCPI (the HCPI is the “Harmonized” CPI created specially in order to be able to compare European countries inflation) than they do in other countries. Conversely, foreign exports have a lower weight in the Eurozone HCPI than they do abroad. What would be the effect on the euro’s real exchange rate with a rise in the European terms of trade (the relative price of European exports in terms of European imports)?