Blog post

Chart of the week: updated monthly real effective exchange rates for 153 countries and the euro area

Publishing date: 30 November 2012
Authors: Zsolt Darvas

Bruegel Working Paper 2012/06 includes data for 178 countries and the euro area, while the monthly database includes 153 countries and the euro area.

We have updated the monthly database up to November 2012. November is not yet over and therefore we approximated the nominal exchange rate with the average during 2 to 26 November. Data of the last few days of the month may change this average, but presumably by not much.

Consumer price indices are available till October for most countries and for a number of countries one or more earlier months are also missing. Similarly to the procedure of the Working Paper, we projected the missing data up to October 2012 and the not-yet available data of November 2012 by assuming that the 12-month inflation has remained unchanged since the latest available observation. Consumer prices do not use to change abruptly and in the short-run the nominal exchange rate is the main determinant of the movement in REER. Therefore, this approximation should not distort much the calculations for the REERs.

Few additions:

Data for Papua New Guinea is now available since January 1995 (the previous start date was November 2004)

Data for Djibouti is now available since January 2004 (previous start date was January 2005)

The updated dataset is available here.

The figure shows our updated monthly REER series for January 1995-November 2012 in comparison with data from World Bank, Eurostat, BIS and OECD (whenever available).

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Figure 1: Monthly CPI-based real effective exchange rates, January 1995 – November 2012 (December 2007 = 100)

About the authors

Zsolt Darvas

Zsolt Darvas is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel and a part-time Senior Research Fellow at the Corvinus University of Budapest. He joined Bruegel in 2008 as a Visiting Fellow, and became a Research Fellow in 2009 and a Senior Fellow in 2013.

From 2005 to 2008, he was the Research Advisor of the Argenta Financial Research Group in Budapest. Before that, he worked at the research unit of the Central Bank of Hungary (1994-2005) where he served as Deputy Head.

Zsolt holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Corvinus University of Budapest where he teaches courses in Econometrics but also at other institutions since 1994. His research interests include macroeconomics, international economics, central banking and time series analysis.