Junko Shimizu

This paper constructs a new dataset of the industry-specific real effective exchange rate, based on the producer price indices, for Japan, China, and Korea on a monthly basis from January 2001 to February 2013 in order to provide a better indicator for export price competitiveness. By conducting simulation analysis, we found that Korean electrical machinery firms substantially improved their cost competitiveness by lowering their production costs during the Korean won appreciation period, while Japanese firms' large plant investment caused by management misjudgments led to excessive production capacity, which resulted in the deterioration of Japanese export competitiveness. A structural vector autoregression analysis also reveals that industry differences of cost competitiveness as well as nominal exchange rate changes have significant impact on export performances of Japan and Korea.

The purpose of this paper is to identify determinants of currency invoicing among Japanese exporting firms with firm-level data, overcoming the usual limitation of data availability, by interviewing 23 representative Japanese firms in three industriesautomobile, electrical machinery and general machinery. Major findings are as follows. First, invoicing in the importer's currency is prevalent in exports to advanced countries, because most of exports by the globally operating firms are destined for local retail subsidiaries of respective firms, which conforms to the pricing-to-market behaviour discussed in the literature. Second, Japanese firms that export highly differentiated products or have a dominant share in the global market tend to invoice their exporting products in the yen both to advanced countries and to developing countries. Third, although Japanese firms have shifted their production bases to Asian countries, exports from Japan to these Asian production subsidiaries tend to be invoiced in US dollars as long as the final destination market is in the USA. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We estimate the nominal equilibrium exchange rate (EER) of the Chinese renminbi (RMB) vis-a-vis the US dollar from 1995 to 2009. While most of the recent empirical studies on the EER employ a cross-country analysis, country-specific factors, especially supply-side real factors, are not fully taken into consideration in estimating the EER. To better reflect Chinas processing exports in the context of growing intra-regional trade in Asia, we incorporate in the empirical analysis the source-country breakdown data on import prices and input coefficients of intermediate inputs by constructing an annual new International inputoutput (IIO) table for the period from 1995 to 2009. The results show that the nominal EER of the RMB appreciates sharply from 2006 to 2009, suggesting that the current RMB exchange rate has been substantially undervalued and should be revalued by 74 per cent as of 2008 compared to the year 2004 level. Such sharp appreciation of the nominal EER corresponds to the dramatic increase in Chinas current account surplus from the mid-2000s, especially against the United States, which is ascribed to the significant improvement of Chinas intermediate input coefficients and, to a lesser extent, an increase in US import prices of intermediate inputs.

Ogawa and Shimizu (2005) proposed an Asian Monetary Unit (AMU), which is a common currency basket composed of ASEAN plus three Asian currencies, and AMU Deviation Indicators (AMU DIs), which indicates deviations of each Asian currency in terms of the AMU compared to the benchmark rate. In this paper, we use daily and monthly data of AMU and AMU DIs to examine their usefulness as a surveillance indicator for monetary cooperation in Asia. We find that an AMU peg system stabilizes the trade-weighted exchange rates within Asia and that AMU DIs warn of misalignments of and between Asia currencies.