PUBLICATIONS & REPORTS

Contents Introduction

The objective of this study is to contribute to the current discussion on the Renminbi (RMB) exchange rate by providing new evidence on China’s exchange rate policy and the impacts of RMB devaluation/revaluation on China’s output and trade balance. For a rigorous empirical examination, this research constructs a vector autoregression (VAR) model and employs the most recent econometric techniques to identify if the Chinese economic system has become responsive to the changes in the exchange rate after about three decades reform. More specifically, we use a structural VAR technique to estimate impulse response functions and variance decompositions for China’s output and trade balance, and to determine how the fundamental macroeconomic shocks contribute to the fluctuations in the real exchange rate, and how output and trade account respond to the identified various shocks. This study will contribute to our better understanding of how far and how fast China’s reforms have transformed the economy to a market-oriented economy, and also the recent discussion on China’s exchange rate policy. It has important policy implications for the concerned economies.