Why Weak Currencies Have a Smaller Effect on Exports

Because manufacturers increasingly use components from abroad to make things, exports now incorporate a lot more imports

Workers at a Robert Bosch GmbH plant in Blaichach, Germany, use touchscreen panels on the automobile gasoline direct injector valve assembly line. Germany is an export powerhouse. PHOTO: KRISZTIAN BOCSI/BLOOMBERG NEWS

By PAUL HANNON, WSJ.com

As various central banks loosened monetary policy this year, some economists predicted another cycle of beggar-thy-neighbor currency wars, in which countries race each other to become the cheapest exporter.

But it hasn’t panned out that way, and now a growing body of evidence suggests why: A shift in trade dynamics is blunting the impact of a weak local currency.

This could be all the more relevant now, when the monetary policies of the world’s most powerful central banks—the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank—are heading in very divergent directions, possibly taking the value of their currencies along with them.

When a country loosens its monetary policy, interest rates fall and investors tend to pull their money out in search of higher yields elsewhere, pushing down the currency’s value.

That is still happening. But the dynamic isn’t affecting trade flows as much as expected. What has changed is where businesses source the things they need to make the products they export. Manufacturers once found most components needed to make their goods at home. Now they increasingly look abroad for such inputs. As a result, exports now incorporate a lot more imports.

It is still the case that when a currency such as the euro weakens, it reduces the price of goods sold by German manufacturers in the U.S. But it also increases the price of the things that German manufacturers import to make those exported goods.

Containers at the Port Newark Container Terminal in Newark, N.J. PHOTO: JULIO CORTEZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Measuring the impact of global supply chains on trade flows is the task of a project undertaken by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the World Trade Organization.

Using detailed figures from economies around the world, economists at the two bodies have measured how much foreign content there is in each nation’s exports, confirming a significant increase since the mid-1990s. The foreign content of Switzerland’s exports, for instance, increased to 21.7% in 2011 from 17.5% in 1995, while the imported content of South Korea’s exports almost doubled, to 41.6% in 2011 from 22.3% in 1995.

Economists at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have used those measures to assess whether currency movements have the same impact they once did on exports and imports. They found that the effect has in fact reduced over time, by as much as 30% in some countries.

Policy makers are beginning to take note. “As countries become more vertically integrated via global value chains, exchange-rate variations will have a diminishing impact on the terms of trade,” said Benoît Coeuré, a member of the European Central Bank’s executive board and one of its thought leaders, speaking in California last month. He concluded the process will reduce the role of currency moves as “shock absorbers” that direct global demand toward weaker economies from stronger ones.

Japan offers the clearest indication that big currency depreciations don’t deliver the export boost they once did. In early 2013, the Bank of Japan launched a massive stimulus program that increased the supply of yen and led to the currency’s sharp depreciation against the dollar and the euro.

That strategy was a key element of Japan’s package of measures designed to lift the economy out of a long period of stagnant growth. But what followed was something of an anticlimax. The yen’s weakening had little impact on Japanese exports, and failed to restart economic growth. Puzzled policy makers pointed to the weak state of demand in the global economy, but even if that were the case, Japanese exporters should have gained market share.

A similar pattern has emerged in the wake of the ECB’s January decision to launch its own program of quantitative easing. Like the yen, the euro weakened, continuing a decline against the dollar that started in early 2014 and now amounts to roughly 20%.

In early 2015, the launch of QE was expected to boost eurozone growth by aiding exports. But once again, the impact of a weakened currency has been modest. Indeed, in the three months to September, eurozone growth was held back by a more rapid growth of imports over exports, while industrial output flatlined.

Experts believe it takes about 12 to 18 months for foreign-exchange moves to have their full impact on trade flows, so the effect would have been felt by now in both the eurozone and Japan. The euro started weakening against the dollar in early 2014, while Japan is about three years into its currency depreciation.

Those disappointments don’t mean currency movements caused by the great divergence between the Fed and the ECB won’t have any impact. That is a key concern for U.S. businesses in the wake of the Fed’s decision this month to raise interest rates for the first time in almost a decade—just weeks after the ECB moved its policy in the opposite direction. Many economists still expect the U.S. to suffer some slowdown in exports, while the eurozone enjoys some pickup. Already in the first 10 months of 2015, the U.S. trade deficit widened by 5.3% from a year earlier, reflecting a decline in exports.

And as the economists from the IMF and World bank have noted, the degree to which a currency movement boosts or reduces exports depends on how large their foreign content is. For the economy as a whole, the foreign share of U.S. exports is at the lower end of the global range, at around 15%, compared with more than 25% in Germany.

“It’s more complicated as a story for the U.S. because of the low foreign content,” saidSebastian Miroudot, a trade economist at the OECD.

—Takashi Nakamichi contributed to this article.

Write to Paul Hannon at paul.hannon@wsj.com

Latest HSBC Global Connections Report details Top Export Destinations and Industries

Resilient China

How strong is China’s economy?

Despite a recent slowdown, the world’s second-biggest economy is more resilient than its critics think

May 26th 2012 |  The Economist 

CHINA’S weight in the global economy means that it commands the world’s attention. When its industrial production, house building and electricity output slow sharply, as they did in the year to April, the news weighs on global stockmarkets and commodity prices. When its central bank eases monetary policy, as it did this month, it creates almost as big a stir as a decision by America’s Federal Reserve. And when China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, stresses the need to maintain growth, as he did last weekend, his words carry more weight with the markets than similar homages to growth from Europe’s leaders. No previous industrial revolution has been so widely watched.

But rapid development can look messy close up, as our special report this week explains; and there is much that is going wrong with China’s economy. It is surprisingly inefficient, and it is not as fair as it should be. But outsiders’ principal concern—that its growth will collapse if it suffers a serious blow, such as the collapse of the euro—is not justified. For the moment, it is likely to prove more resilient than its detractors fear. Its difficulties, and they are considerable, will emerge later on.

Unfair, but not unstable

Outsiders tend to regard China as a paragon of export-led efficiency. But that is not the whole story. Investment spending on machinery, buildings and infrastructure accounted for over half of China’s growth last year; net exports contributed none of it. Too much of this investment is undertaken by state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which benefit from implicit subsidies, sheltered markets and politically encouraged loans. Examples of waste abound, from a ghost city on China’s northern steppe to decadent resorts on its southern shores.

China’s economic model is also unfair on its people. Regulated interest rates enable banks to rip off savers, by underpaying them for their deposits. Barriers to competition allow the SOEs to overcharge consumers for their products. China’s household-registration system denies equal access to public services for rural migrants, who work in the cities but are registered in the villages. Arbitrary land laws allow local governments to cheat farmers, by underpaying them for the agricultural plots they buy off them for development. And many of the proceeds end up in the pockets of officials.

This cronyism and profligacy leads critics to liken China to other fast-growing economies that subsequently suffered a spectacular downfall. One recent comparison is with the Asian tigers before their financial comeuppance in 1997-98. The tigers’ high investment rates powered growth for a while, but they also fostered a financial fragility that was cruelly exposed when exports slowed, investment faltered and foreign capital fled. Critics point out that not only is China investing at a faster rate than the tigers ever did, but its banks and other lenders have also been on an astonishing lending binge, with credit jumping from 122% of GDP in 2008 to 171% in 2010, as the government engineered a bout of “stimulus lending”.

Yet the very unfairness of China’s system gives it an unusual resilience. Unlike the tigers, China relies very little on foreign borrowing. Its growth is financed from resources extracted from its own population, not from fickle foreigners free to flee, as happened in South-East Asia (and is happening again in parts of the euro zone). China’s saving rate, at 51% of GDP, is even higher than its investment rate. And the repressive state-dominated financial system those savings are kept in is actually well placed to deal with repayment delays and defaults.

Most obviously, China’s banks are highly liquid. Their deposit-taking more than matches their loan-making, and they keep a fifth of their deposits in reserve at the central bank. That gives the banks some scope to roll over troublesome loans that may be repaid at a later date, or written off at a more convenient time. But there is also the backstop of the central government, which has formal debts amounting to only about 25% of GDP. Local-government debts might double that proportion, but China plainly has enough fiscal space to recapitalise any bank threatened with insolvency.

That space also gives the government room to stimulate growth again, should exports to Europe fall off a cliff. China’s government spent a lot on infrastructure when the credit crunch struck its customers in the West. But there is no shortage of other things it could finance. It could redouble its efforts to expand rural health care, for example. China still has only one family doctor for every 22,000 people. If ordinary Chinese knew that their health would be looked after in their old age, they would save less and spend more. Household consumption accounts for little more than a third of the economy.

Time is on my side

That underlines the longer-term problem China faces. The same quirks and unfairnesses that would help it withstand a shock in the next few years will, over time, work against the country. China’s phenomenal saving rate will start falling, as the population ages and workers become more expensive. Capital is also already becoming less captive. Fed up with the miserable returns on their deposits, savers are demanding alternatives. Some are also finding ways to take their money out of the country, contributing to unusual downward pressure on the currency. China’s bank deposits grew at their slowest rate on record in the year to April.

So China will have to learn how to use its capital more wisely. That will require it to lift barriers to private investment in lucrative markets still dominated by wasteful SOEs. It will also require a less cosseted banking system and a better social-security net, never mind the political and social reforms that will be needed in the coming decade.

China’s reformers have a big job ahead, but they also have some time. Pessimists compare it to Japan, which like China was a creditor nation when its bubble burst in 1991. But Japan did not blow up until its income per head was 120% of America’s (at market exchange rates). If China’s income per head were to reach that level, its economy would be five times as big as America’s. That is a long way off.