Exchange Rate Pass-through in South Africa: Panel Evidence from Individual Goods and Services

This paper studies exchange rate pass-through in South Africa at the most disaggregated level possible. To accomplish this, two distinct panels of disaggregated data are employed. The first data set contains annual prices of 158 individual goods and services at the consumer level from 1990 to 2009. The second panel contains quarterly average import unit-values for twenty-six 8-digit import categories from ten of South Africa’s top trading partners from 1998 Q1 to 2009 Q2. The study finds low pass-through to consumer prices (between 15 and 25 percent in the two years following an exchange rate change), slow convergence to long run purchasing power parity (6.4 years), and no apparent tendency for pass-through to have declined during the last twenty years. Relatively high estimates were found for import price pass-through from Brazil and the United States (75 percent), while Taiwan, Switzerland, India, Great Britain, and Germany were nearer the overall average of 60 percent. As with final consumer prices, there is little evidence of a decline in pass-through to import prices.