Exchange-rate volatility and Malaysian-Thai bilateral industry trade flows

Muhammad Aftab, Karim Syed and Naveed Akhter Katper

Journal of Economic Studies, 2017, vol. 44, issue 1, 99-114

Abstract: Purpose - After the fall of fix exchange rate regime in early 1970s, the nexus between the exchange rate volatility and trade flows has been of a great interest to the policy makers and researchers. Resultantly an extensive literature is available on the topic. However, the research findings are inconclusiveness so far. The purpose of this paper is to examine the exchange-rate volatility and bilateral industry trade link between the two important countries of Southeast Asia, i.e. Malaysia and Thailand. Design/methodology/approach - This study employs Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) (1, 1) to measure exchange rate volatility and autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to study the relationship between exchange rate volatility and trade flows. ARDL approach is suitable to accommodate the mix cases (i.e. stationary and first difference stationary). The paper considers 62 Malaysian exporting and 60 Malaysian importing industries with Thailand over the monthly period 2000-2013. Findings - Findings suggest the influence of exchange-rate volatility on the trade flows in a limited number of industries. Large industries like instruments and apparatus experience negative influence from exchange-rate volatility. Originality/value - Past literature continued to be inconclusiveness on the nexus between exchange-rate volatility and trade flows due to its over-reliance on the aggregated data. Besides, the past studies are more based on quarterly or yearly frequency data. These issues contribute to the aggregation bias. This research focusses on a country bilateral trade pair, using industry level disaggregated monthly data. Such research is rare in Malaysian-Thai bilateral trade context. This study uses a suitable estimation approach and also draws valuable implications.

Keywords: Malaysia; Thailand; Exchange-rate volatility; Trade flows (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (74)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:eme:jespps:jes-05-2015-0091

DOI: 10.1108/JES-05-2015-0091

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Studies is currently edited by Prof Mohsen Bahmani-Oskooee

More articles in Journal of Economic Studies from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().