EXCHANGE RATE MANAGEMENT IN VIETNAM FOR SUSTAINING STABLE AND LONG-TERM ECONOMIC GROWTH

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to measure empirically the effects of currency depreciation on inflation and trade balance in the case of Vietnam. The author utilizes the quarterly data from 2000 to 2012 for the Vector Auto-Regression (VAR) model to build the impulse response functions and variance decompositions of inflation and trade balance. The obtained results are remarkably consistent with economic principles in the theoryreview. The impulse response functions indicate that currency depreciation has considerable negative impact on inflation while having fairly positive impacts on trade balance. However, variance decompositions of trade balance show that exchange rate itself can hardly explain much about the change in trade balance. Basing on these results, the author proposes (1) stabilization of exchange rate to restrain inflation and (2) enhancing the quality of exported goods to improve competitiveness.