Real effective exchange rates for 178 countries: a new database

by Zsolt Darvas on 15th March 2012

Click here for the most recently updated database

The real effective exchange rate (REER), which measures the development of the real value of a country’s currency against the basket of the trading partners of the country, is a frequently used variable in both theoretical and applied economic research and policy analysis. It is used for a wide variety of purposes, such as assessing the equilibrium value of a currency, the change in price or cost competitiveness, the drivers of trade flows, or incentives for reallocation production between the tradable and the non-tradable sectors.

Due to the importance of the REER in economic research and policy analysis, several institutions, such as the World Bank, the Eurostat, the BIS, the OECD, just to name a few, publish various REER indicators which are freely downloadable. Altogether, these institutions publish data for 113 countries. The countries for which data are available include all advanced and several emerging and developing countries. However, different databases may have different methodologies and even the 109 countries included in the World Bank database miss several dozen countries of the world.

Our database has three novelties:

  1. Using a consistent methodology, we calculate CPI-based REER for 178 countries (plus the euro area) for annual data and for 153 countries (plus the euro area) for monthly data.
  2. We calculate the REER for all countries up to date, eg in the current vintage of the database we calculate up to January 2012.
  3. It is relatively easy to calculate REER against any arbitrary group of countries – what is needed for this is a re-scaling of the weighting matrix.

The database will be irregularly updated.

Add a comment

  • sam vali 30th April 2013

    hi

  • mica petkovic 22nd February 2013

    Great job.
    I have just two questions for the weights. What is the base period, and how do you estimate gross output for all countries in the world. I think it is very robust calculation from this paper "New rates from new weights" in which they use ratio 10/3 to get domestic production from GVA, especialy for emerging markets.

  • Scott 22nd November 2012

    Great stuff -- many thanks for making it publicly available.

    One question -- what did you do about Argentina CPI series? Did you use the official one or a proxy?

    Many thanks!

    -Scott Urban

    • Zsolt Darvas 13th December 2012

      The data sources for Argentine CPI are the same as for most other countries: World Bank databases (which have both monthly and annual data) and the IMF’s WEO (which has only annual data). I presume these databases consider the official statistics.
      Zsolt Darvas

  • Jalal 19th October 2012

    Thanks a lot for such a great database. it saved me another month of troubles and thinking over what to use instead of REER (considering that the countries i m working with have were not available in other databases) Thanks a lot!

  • Kapila from Sri Lanka 5th August 2012

    Excellent Contribution!!
    Thank you very much for make available these data for acadamics/researched worldwide.
    Also, keen to see monthly/quartarly REER for Sri Lanka since 1975.
    Thank you again.

  • hossein nabizadeh 23rd July 2012

    Dear Dr
    thank you for your research
    i am from iran but the most import thing which you did not consider (world bank & imf too) is iran's market exchange rate
    it is so different from official rate
    in my own thesis i should to estimate Reer but with market rate,can you help me and let me know how can i calculate reer?i can send you market rate from 1960 -2012 too
    thank again

  • Iñaki Aldasoro 16th March 2012

    Very useful contribution for cross-country empirical research. Thank you!