The Impact of Yuan/Ringgit on Bilateral Trade Balance of China and Malaysia

The exposure to exchange rates remains an unresolved issue in international trade literature. The issue is particularly relevant to China and Malaysia, whom relaxed their USD pegging the same day in the mid of 2005. Our paper investigates the exchange rate exposure of China-Malaysian bilateral trade balance over the last 20 years using a standard trade balance equation which is a function of local income, foreign income, and the bilateral real exchange rates of yuan/ringgit. Our modeling is somewhat different with the literature where we take into account the structural breaks of the 1997 Asian currency crisis as well as the fixed-exchange rate regime adopted by the Malaysia. With high frequency monthly sample (Jan1990-Jan2008), we documented GARCH effect in the trade model. Taking that into consideration, our result shows that real exchange rates do play a role in the bilateral trade of China-Malaysia. The long run exchange rate elasticity is consistent with the Marshall-Lerner condition. However, the short run J-curve phenomenon is somewhat inconclusive