Global Value Chains and Effective Exchange Rates

The real effective exchange rate (REER) is one of the most cited statistics in open-economy macroeconomics. We show that the models used to compute these numbers are not rich enough to allow for the rising importance of global value chains. Moreover, because different sectors within a country participate in international production sharing at different stages, sector-level variations are also important for determining competitiveness. Incorporating these features, we develop a framework to compute REER at both the sector and country level and apply it on intercountry input-output tables to study the properties of the new measures.