實質匯率與總要素生產力之研究–‭ ‬以台灣及其夥伴國為例

The accusation of currency manipulation from Washington is a serious international issue, since it may jeopardize the trading relation with the United States. Furthermore, the Department of Commerce of the United States may exercise U.S. Section 301, and consequences would be detrimental. In this paper, we apply Balassa-Samuelson theory particularly for Taiwan and its main trading partners in Asia to learn whether the misalignment of real exchange rates exists. Our illustrative model follows closely to the work of Kakkar and Yan (2012) to decompose the real exchange rate explaining by the productivity difference resulting from traded and nontraded sectors. In empirical analysis, total factor productivities of sectoral economies have always been challenge, since gross capital stocks for sectors usually are rarely available. We apply the dataset developed recently by Mano and Castillo (2015) to overcome this challenge. In our sample, Taiwan, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand have shown clear and persistent misalignment of real exchange rates deviating from TFPs from the 1980s to 2012. Moreover, after thorough decomposition, the main contribution of the misalignment is from the volatility of nominal exchange rates of Asian economies. However, there are a few unsolved questions left in this paper which may have created biased estimates. For example, monetary stance, institutional quality, financial openness, and enough fixed and random effect needed to be further discussed.