Exchange rate pass-through to domestic prices in the Central European countries

Exchange rate plays an important role in transmitting pressures from the external shocks to the domestic economy. Development of inflation in the domestic economy is significantly determined by the ability of exchange rate to transmit external price related pressures to the domestic market. Considering the new EU member countries obligation to adopt euro the loss of the monetary sovereignty should be analyzed not only in the view of the direct positive and negative effects of this decision but also in the view of many indirect effects. While the exchange rates of majority of the EMU candidate countries are strongly affected by the euro exchange rate on the international markets there is still room for them to float partially reflecting changes in the national economic development. Ability of the exchange rate to transfer external shocks to the national economy remains one of the most discussed areas relating to the current stage of the monetary integration process in the European single market. In the paper we analyze the ability of the exchange rate to weaken or eventually to strengthen the transmission of the external inflation pressures to the national economy in the Czech republic, Hungary, Poland and the Slovak republic. In order to meet this objective we estimate a vector autoregression (VAR) model correctly identified by the Cholesky decomposition of innovations that allows us to identify structural shocks hitting the model. Variance decomposition and impulse-response functions are computed in order to estimate the exchange rate pass-through from the foreign prices of import to the domestic consumer price indexes in the Visegrad countries. Ordering of the endogenous variables in the model is also considered allowing us to check the robustness of the empirical results.