Do the Exchange Rates Converge Among Fragile Market Economies? New Evidence from LM and RALS-LM Unit Root Tests

Global financial integration causes the economic consequences of economic crises, wars, or pandemics to be felt more in developing countries and triggers high exchange rate volatilities in these economies. In such an integrated financial environment, it is an interesting research domain how and why the exchange rate volatilities of countries are not affected similarly but tend to diverge from each other. This study investigates whether the exchange rate volatilities of fragile market economies converge in the stochastic convergence framework. To answer this question, we analyzed the stochastic behavior of the series using the traditional and structural break unit root tests besides RALS unit root tests, which consider the information of non-normal errors. The discussions regarding the size and power properties of test procedures in the unit root testing literature have formed a crucial part of the implications of the test results. In light of these discussions, we conclude that the stochastic convergence assumption is valid for Brazil, South Africa, India, and Hungary, whereas it is not valid for Argentina, Mexico, and Türkiye. The policy implications of our findings are that fragile market economies have different fragility levels among themselves and countries with high fragility levels show higher volatility than others.