In recent years wages in China have been rising and the yuan has appreciated, potentially eroding China’s cost advantage in manufactures. This paper explores the evolution of China’s relative unit labor costs in manufacturing over 1998-2009. Between 1998 and 2003 China’s unit labor costs...

This paper provides a new perspective on Chinese international competitiveness in manufacturing using relative unit labour costs. We find that Chinese unit labour costs are about 25-40 per cent of US labour costs. They are also low relative to costs in the EU, Japan, Mexico, Korea and most other...

This paper estimates exchange rate pass-through for a unique set of bilateral US import prices over the period 1992-2006. It finds evidence of a significant decline in pass-through to US import prices from some, but not all, of the trading partners in the sample. These differences rule out a...

This study tests the stability of a standard equation for aggregate US imports over the period 1975–2011. It finds evidence of significant parameter instability, though its dating varies with the equation specification and diagnostic. Nonetheless, the analysis finds a significant rise in the...

The bilateral trade flows between Canada and the US have grown rapidly in the 1990s. Are they evidence of an emerging North American trading bloc? A gravity model of trade finds that while economic size and proximity can explain much of the substantial trade between Canada and the US, the US...

This paper investigates the exchange rate response of Japanese export prices over the period 1980 through 2007 using sector-specific measures of the yen's value relative to invoicing currencies. It finds a significant increase in the response of total export prices to the yen in the late 1990s....