Analyzing the Effect of Exchange Rate Pass- Through on Inflation in Iran (1991-2012)

The exchange rate pass-through explains the relationship between changes in national currency and foreign trade of a country, while the responsiveness of trade to the currency changes depends on the perfect or imperfect degree of pass-through.
The objective of this study is to analyze the effect of exchange rate pass-through on inflation in Iran as one of the main oil-exporting countries. To this end, we have specified a Structural Vector Auto-Regressive (SVAR) model including macroeconomic variables such as oil revenues, output gap, free market exchange rate, import prices, producer prices, consumer prices and money supply. To estimate the model, we have used quarterly data over the period 1991:1 - 2012:4.
Empirical results of the model estimation, which are in forms of impulse response functions and variance decomposition, have shown that although the degree of exchange rate pass-through to the price indices has been incomplete, changes in the exchange rate have led to fluctuations in the prices explaining partly Iran’s inflationary situation during the period under consideration. It also reveals the fact that a higher share of imported inflation implies the economy’s dependence on imports.