Evidence on PPP for Selected Asian Countries from a Panel Cointegration Test with Structural Breaks

The goal of this article is to examine evidence for purchasing power parity (PPP) for a panel of Asian countries, namely Malaysia, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. Our main contribution is that for the first time in this literature we use a panel cointegration test, developed by Westerlund (2006), which allows us to incorporate multiple structural breaks. We find that using Gregory and Hansen's (1996) residual-based test for cointegration and Pedroni's (1999) panel cointegration test without structural breaks provide weak evidence of cointegration between nominal exchange rates vis-a-vis the US dollar and relative prices. However, when we use the Lagrange multiplier panel structural break cointegration test we find strong evidence of panel cointegration, providing evidence for PPP