Hopium and Japanese exports
David Keohane
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David joined the FT in 2011 as a Marjorie Deane fellow. He covered emerging markets, equities and currencies before making the jump over to FT Alphaville in May 2012.
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| May 08 08:55 |
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A surging stock market, increased corporate earnings (
check out Toyota) and frothy
domestic consumer spending are lending some real optimism to Japan’s Abenomics but the main avenue through which hope flows might be narrower than originally thought.
Consider this chart from Citi’s Steven Englander:

What that shows is Japanese exports as a share of combined exports of China, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, India Philippines and Taiwan (light blue) and of the same set of countries ex-China (dark blue), all in dollars.
In 1992 Japan exported about $67 for every $100 exported by these major Asian mainland exporters. In 1992 it bossed Asia in terms of exports but by 2003 Japanese exports were just over the 30 per cent of major Asian mainland exports. By the end of 2012, Japan’s exports were about 15 per cent the size of these Asian mainland exporters. There is an element of absolute gain at work here of course, but still.
From Englander (our emphasis):
USDJPY appreciated by about 20% from early 2005 to mid-2007 (the shaded area in the Figure 1). That was at a time when Japan was far more important on the export side than it us now. The 20% depreciation certainly did not break the trend decline in JPY export importance. JPY at 99 in 2012 is stronger even corrected for price level changes than JPY at 120 in 2007, so expectations that the recent depreciation will be a game change are exaggerated. Developed economies with differentiated, branded, high value added products and established supply chains do not compete primarily on the basis of price. In fact it is more accurate to argue that they compete on the basis of price (via currency depreciation) because they are failing on the other dimensions. But it is not likely that price elasticities of demand are early as high as they are for commodities and non-differentiated products.
His conclusion is that a weaker exchange rate is not likely to help Japanese exports nearly as much as hoped, but it will not discourage further depreciation, given that the macro policy tool chest is pretty empty.

It’s a similar story to the UK’s, where sterling’s depreciation from 2007 didn’t really do very much for exports. Japanese companies will benefit from the weaker yen but there are structural problems that cannot be fixed by any rate dive.
It also suggests that German fears about export competition might be overblown in terms of euro strength and yen weakness, and that the ECB’s covert currency war — via negative-interest-rate mind tricks which remind the Japanese not to go too far — might remain just that. At least where the currency is concerned, that is.