Global Value Chains and the transmission of exchange rate shocks to consumer prices

Following the 2008 financial crisis, inflation rates in advanced economies have been at odds with the prediction of a standard Phillips curve. This puzzle has triggered a debate on the global determinants of domestic prices. We contribute to this debate by investigating the impact of exchange rate shocks on consumer prices from 1995 to 2018. We focus on cost-push inflation through global value chains, using three sectoral world input-output datasets. Depending on countries, the absolute value of the elasticity of the household consumption expenditure (HCE hereafter) deflator to the exchange rate ranges from 0.05 to 0.35, confirming the importance of global value chains in channelling external shocks to domestic inflation. Using data from WIOD on a sample of 43 countries, we find that the mean output-weighted elasticity of the HCE deflator to the exchange rate increased in absolute value from 0.075 in 2000 to 0.094 in 2008. After peaking in 2008, it declined to 0.088 in 2014. World Input-Output tables (WIOT hereafter) are released with a lag of several years and the latest WIOT dates back to 2015. To fill this gap, we approximate the impact of an exchange rate shock on the HCE deflator from 2016 onwards using up-to-date GDP and trade data. Our extrapolations suggest that the decline in the elasticity of the HCE deflator continued until 2016, before reversing in 2017 and 2018. Our findings are robust to using three different datasets.