The Impact of Budget Deficits on Currency Value: A Comparison of Asian and European Countries

This paper reexamines the relationship between budget deficits and exchange rates by applying Hakkio’s (1996) model to seven Asian countries and eight Euro‐currency countries over the years from 1951 to 2001. Applying the Time‐Series Cross‐Section Regression with the Seemingly Unrelated Regression approach to data from 15 countries, the results indicate that because of the indirect effect of the expected inflation rate, the risk premium, and the expected return rate, currency values are inversely related to budget deficits. However, the empirical results also present evidence supporting the Ricardian Equivalence Proposition that there is no direct effect of budget deficits on exchange rates.