Exchange rate volatility and UK imports from developing countries: The effect of the global financial crisis

This paper studies the role of exchange rate volatility in determining the UK's real imports from three major developing countries – Brazil, China, and South Africa. The paper contributes to the literature by investigating the third country effect and also by analyzing the impact of the current financial crisis on the relationship between exchange rate volatility and UK imports. This paper further expands the empirical literature on the subject by offering evidence based on the asymmetric autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) method from the application of monthly data from January 1991 to December 2011. Results suggest that exchange rate volatility plays an important role in determination of trade and also reveal a significant effect of the recent financial crisis on UK imports. This finding remains consistent when we test for the third country volatility effect. We also find that there is a significant causal relationship between exchange rate volatility and UK imports. The third country effect is significant for all the countries investigated. These results have significant implications for the trade policy and international trade in minimizing the underlying risk factors and ensuring stable trade flows in different economic scenarios.