Terms-of-trade shocks are not all alike

Federico Di Pace, Luciana Juvenal () and Ivan Petrella
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Luciana Juvenal: International Monetary Fund

No 901, Bank of England working papers from Bank of England

Abstract: When analyzing terms-of-trade shocks, it is implicitly assumed that the economy responds symmetrically to changes in export and import prices. Using a sample of developing countries our paper shows that this is not the case. We construct export and import price indices using commodity and manufacturing price data matched with trade shares and separately identify export price, import price, and global economic activity shocks using sign and narrative restrictions. Taken together, export and import price shocks account for around 40% of output fluctuations but export price shocks are, on average, twice as important as import price shocks for domestic business cycles. Given that shifts in export and import prices have asymmetric effects on the economy, global economic activity shocks, which simultaneously affect export and import prices, are largely undetected in the terms of trade measure but have large effects on domestic business cycles.

Keywords: Terms of trade; commodity prices; business cycles; world shocks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F41 F44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2021-01-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-int and nep-opm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Terms-of-Trade Shocks are Not all Alike (2020)
Working Paper: Terms-of-Trade Shocks are Not all Alike (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boe:boeewp:0901

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