Effect of Exchange Rate on Trade Balance in Major East African Countries: Evidence from Panel Cointegration

This paper attempts an empirical investigation of the impact of exchange rate devaluation on major east African countries trade balance using the panel co-integration and panel group fully modified least square estimation technique from 1990-2014. Whether exchange rate devaluation improves or worsens trade balance has been at the centre of literature debate over time with varying empirical evidences for developed and developing nation. The results indicate that there exist a long-run stationary relationship between trade balance and its determinant- foreign and domestic income, nominal exchange rate as employed in the study. The research major findings include; nominal exchange rate induces inelastic and significant relation on trade balance in the long run. From this, the paper concludes that the trade balance deteriorate with increasing depreciation of exchange rate (as a value effect in east African countries). Again, it found that the coefficient of domestic income is negative and significant implying that the booming of real domestic income increases the purchasing power of their household to import more resulting trade deficit in the long run. Moreover the paper found that inelastic coefficient of nominal exchange rate in line with the theoretical Marshall-Lerner condition i.e. “the demand for import and export is inelastic then devaluation would further increase the trade deficit” [21]. Therefore based on the empirical findings the researcher recommends that the policy maker of these countries should take emphasis not to devaluate exchange rate more and selecting countries with higher income to make import and export elastic and improve trade balance in the long run.