2013 Reports

Real Exchange Rates in a Model of Structural Change: Applications to the Real Yen-Dollar and Chinese RMB-Dollar Exchange Rates

Dekle, Robert

We tackle the important issue of what the appropriate trends in the real Yen-Dollar and RMB-Dollar are over time. Over the long-run, the real yen has been
appreciating against the U.S. dollar; while the real RMB-dollar rate has been
depreciating (until 1999). In this paper, we build a macroeconomic-trade model of Japan-U.S. trade on the one hand, and China-U.S. trade on the other. Our model is essentially a general equilibrium extension of the Balassa-Samuelson effect. We show that these long-run trends in the real yen-dollar and RMB-dollar rates in the data can be justified by our model.