Exchange rate undervaluation and African surges: What do we learn from exported products?

Camille da Piedade, Luc Jacolin and Patrick Plane

The World Economy, 2025, vol. 48, issue 3, 535-574

Abstract: We study the role of undervaluation of currency exchange rates in triggering African product export surges. Over the period 1995–2017, 96 episodes are identified for 41 African countries from a basket of their primary and manufactured exported goods (149 products, 4‐digit HS code). We compute country‐product specific real exchange rate misalignments, that allow testing the hypothesis that undervaluation drives competitiveness and thus export surges. The complementary log–log model confirms that product‐specific undervaluation promotes the occurrence of surge episodes. This effect proves robust to the way we define export episodes, the introduction of covariates in the model and the use of the Relogit as an alternative estimator for rare events.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/twec.13658

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:worlde:v:48:y:2025:i:3:p:535-574

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0378-5920

Access Statistics for this article

The World Economy is currently edited by David Greenaway

More articles in The World Economy from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().