Inflation dynamics and trade openness: with an application to South Africa

Janine Aron () and John Muellbauer ()

No 2007-11, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: Evolving openness to trade is hard to measure, despite its relevance to models of growth, inflation and exchange rates. Our innovative technique measures trade openness encompassing both observable trade policy (tariffs and surcharges) and unobservable trade policy (quotas and other nontariff barriers), capturing the latter by a smooth non-linear stochastic trend in a model for the share of manufactured imports in home demand for manufactured goods, controlling for the business cycle and exchange rate. The evidence for South Africa suggests that increased openness has significantly reduced the mean inflation rate and has reduced the exchange rate pass-through into wholesale prices.

JEL-codes: F13 F41 E31 C22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations View citations in EconPapers (1) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.csae.ox.ac.uk/workingpapers/pdfs/2007-11text.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2007-11

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Richard Payne ().