Impacts of exchange rates on international forest products trade are widely debated, but the
empirical evidence regarding this issue is still inconclusive. Here, we report findings of the
impacts of the exchange rates on the main forest product imports and exports of the US, from
January 1989 to November 2004. Export data consisted of monthly series of the main
products exported by the US to different countries. For imports we used monthly series of the
principal products imported by the US from Canada, the major source of imports. The
strongest evidence was obtained by pooling the data across countries and products. In the
short run, exports were very elastic with respect to the exchange rate (
2.6), while imports
were moderately elastic (1.2). In the long run, the elasticity decreased but remained significant
(0.5 for both exports and imports). Appreciation of the US dollar tended to matter more than
depreciation, but the hypothesis that the effect of exchange rate was symmetric could not be
rejected.