Pass-through of exchange rates and import prices to domestic inflation in some industrialised economies

BIS Working Papers  |  No 79  | 
01 November 1999
This paper examines the impact of exchange rates and import prices on domestic PPI and CPI in selected industrialised economies. The empirical model is a VAR incorporating a distribution chain of pricing. Impulse responses and variance decompositions indicate that these external factors have a modest effect on domestic price inflation over the post-Bretton Woods era. The pass-through is somewhat stronger in countries with a larger import share. A historical decomposition over 1996-98 indicates, however, that external factors have had a sizable disinflationary effect in most of the countries during the past couple of years. Estimating the model using post-1982 data has little effect on these conclusions.