China's Import-exchange Rate Linkage: Evidence from the China-bound Exports of Japan and Korea

This paper examines how the China-bound exports of Japan and Korea are related to exchange rates, motivated by the fact that processing trade makes up a large proportion of China's trade, and that Japan and Korea are the leading source countries for processing imports. Because processing imports are inputs for exports, the link between such imports and China's exchange rates are ambiguous. We estimate export functions that include China's RMB real effective exchange rates (REER) along with bilateral real exchange rates (BRER) using Johansen's cointegration method and find that the RMB REER significantly affects Japanese and Korean exports to China, even more so than BRER in most cases examined. These two exchange rates appear in the export equations with opposite signs. Subsequently, we use the estimated model to illustrate the importance of accounting for a concurrent change in BRER when analyzing the effects of a hypothetical RMB revaluation on China's trade balances despite the apparently weak imports-BRER linkage.