Repasse cambial reverso : uma avaliação sobre a relação entre taxa de câmbio e IPCA no Brasil (1999-2007)

Abstract

The present dissertation discusses the exchange rate pass-through to the headline inflation index, i.e. extensive national consumer price index (IPCA) in the Brazilian economy between January 1999 and December 2007. The vast majority of works dealing with this issue addresses the reduction of the pass-through after the adoption of the inflation targeting regime and / or focuses on the impact of exchange rate devaluation over the price index. This work, alternatively, discusses the role of the Brazilian currency appreciation in the recent period, resulting in what was labeled as reverse exchange rate pass-through. Thus, we have used a model of auto-regressive vectors to estimate the exchange rate pass-through for the full period (1999-2007), and for two other periods: between January 1999 and June 2003 (sample 1), during which there was a tendency for devaluation and increase in domestic prices, and from July 2003 to December 2007 (sample 2), that was a period characterized by the reverse process, that is exchange rate appreciation and in the most cases the achieving of the inflation targets. The main results were: (i) in the long run the exchange rate pass-through coefficients to IPCA of the two samples were higher than those observed for the full period, and (ii) the pass-through estimated for the sample 2 was very high, despite the fact that it was lower than that obtained for the sample 1. Those results reinforce the argument that the exchange rate played a prominent role in controlling inflation in the period 2003-2007.