Interest rates, inflation, and exchange rates in fragile EMEs: A fresh look at the long-run interrelationships

This study attempts to establish the possible existence of the long-run interrelationship between interest rates, inflation, and exchange rates in five fragile emerging market economies (Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey), what is so-called by Morgan Stanley ‘Fragile Five'. To do so, we utilize Li and Lee's (2010) Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ADL) test for threshold cointegration and apply it to sample countries' monthly time-series data from 2013:1 to 2018:12. Overall, our primary results are threefold: First, there seems to be a long-run positive relationship between actual rates of inflation rates and nominal interest rates supporting the validity of the ex-post Fisher hypothesis for all the sample countries. Second, the sample countries' data supports the presence of a cointegration relationship between interest rates and exchange rates for the case of Brazil, India, and Turkey but not for the case of Indonesia and South Africa. Lastly, without exception, exchange rates and actual rates of inflation in all the sample countries examined tend to co-move in the long-run, implying that the depreciation of their currencies creates inflation through raising the prices of imported goods. The results above are widely compatible with both theoretical expectations and the results of the most previous empirical studies on the long-run interrelationships between interest rates, inflation, and exchange rates in the literature.