Impacto da não linearidade da taxa de câmbio sobre as exportações e importações brasileiras

Abstract

Recent macroeconomic research has advocated in favor of the possibility of asymmetrical adjustments in various economic variables. Indeed, econometric techniques have evolved to encompass the idea of nonlinear cointegration. Thus, this study aims to investigate under a nonlinear fashion the effects of the exchange rate nonlinearities on the flow of international trade on disaggregated Brazilian exports and imports for five trading partners, from 1999 to 2015. For this purpose, the NARDL methodology (Shin et. al. 2014) was applied, followed by cointegration and non-linearity tests. The study enables the differentiation between the impact on trade of the exchange rate appreciations and depreciations, as well the impact of small and large variations of the exchange rate, in which the hysteresis hypothesis can be tested. The disaggregation applied here contributed to a more realistic estimation of the effect of the exchange rate on exports and imports, especially for the Brazilian case, where there is still few studies in this line. The results, among others, showed that imports adhear more closely to the nonlinear model than exports. Moreover, the exchange rate non-linearities showed a better response to the models (in terms of statistical significance) when they have a negative impact on trade; exchange rate appreciations tend to have a larger impact on exports and depreciation on imports. One of the conclusions concerning exchange rate policy is that an incentive to the exports resulting from an over depreciated exchange rate may actually have more impact over the imports, discouraging them.