Impacto de la volatilidad del tipo de cambio real en las exportaciones: Evidencia empí­rica para Europa, Sudamérica y Oceaní­a

This paper investigates empirically the impact of real exchange rate (RER) volatility, as a proxy of exchange rate uncertainty, on total exports for a panel of European, South American and Oceania countries during the period 1994 – 2014. The methodology used for the estimation consists of the combination of panel data models with autoregressive vectors (panel VAR) technique, analysis of the impulse-response functions and the variance decomposition. RER volatility was modeled by two alternatives: the standard deviation moving average and the conditional variance. Considering the total panel of countries, regardless of the measure of volatility used, it does not have a significant effect on exports. However, considering separately different groups of countries, RER volatility has a significant and positive effect on commodity-exporting countries, and significant and negative on manufacturing exporting countries. Nevertheless, in both cases the effects were very low. This study is relevant since it provides empirical evidence on the understanding of the exchange rate uncertainty effects on the stability of international trade, and hence on the stability of economic growth for economies with different characteristics.