Current account, exchange rate dynamics and the predictability: the experience of Malaysia and Singapore

The East Asian financial crisis indicated that one of the factors that played a critical role in affecting the exchange rate of a country was its current account balance. This paper attempts to investigate this hypothesis. The Singaporean dollar (SD) and the Malaysian ringgit (RM) against the yen are taken as case studies. Our analysis is based on the recent cointegration method and we examine two issues. First, whether the exchange rates are cointegrated with the fundamentals as predicted by economic theory. Our focus was to investigate whether the exchange rate movements are affected by the economic fundamentals, particularly the current account balance. Our findings suggest that the model fits the data well. Secondly, we wanted to test the validity of our model for forecasting future exchange rates. The findings show that the model does produce good in-sample as well as out-of-sample forecasts.