An Assessment of Purchasing Power Parity in the Long-Run: Evidence from India and its four Major Trading Partners

The present study focuses on evaluating the validity of the Relative Purchasing Power Parity (RPPP) theory for India and its four major trading partner nations namely the United States, China, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia using monthly time series spanning January 2001 to March 2021. For the purpose of empirical analysis, standard Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) and Phillips-Perron (PP) unit root tests, as well as the Johansen-Juselius cointegration technique, have been applied. Firstly, the stationarity of the real exchange rate has been investigated using standard unit root tests. The findings indicate that each country’s real exchange rate is nonstationary signifying the absence of strong PPP. Thereafter, the weak form of PPP was tested in the second stage using the Johansen cointegration test. The findings of the cointegration test confirm the presence of a long-run relationship among bilateral exchange rates, domestic price levels, and foreign price levels for all countries undertaken except for the UAE. Since three economies from among the total four trading partners’ country-pair support the existence of PPP, it can be said that PPP holds for the Indian rupee exchange rate for the economies so considered. The study further signals that India’s trade with the UAE could lead to arbitrage opportunities.