Survey: No.2014-1-05

Questionnaire Survey on the Choice of Invoice Currency by Japanese Overseas Subsidiaries

Research Projects

Research on Exchange Rate Pass-Through

Project Leader

ITO Takatoshi (Faculty Fellow)

Purposes and Background of the Survey

The aim of the project is to investigate choices in invoice currencies and exchange rate risk management from the corporate-level perspective.

In August 2010, we conducted the first comprehensive questionnaire survey on the choice of invoice currency in overseas subsidiaries owned by Japanese companies, which successfully demonstrated how invoice currency was chosen and currency risk was managed in the production and distribution networks of Japanese manufacturers in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Since that first survey, Abenomics, an active economic policy introduced by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the end of 2012, has dramatically changed the continuous trend of yen appreciation and boosted yen depreciation, a shift which could conceivably affect invoice currency choices and the approach to currency risk management adopted by Japanese foreign subsidiaries. In addition, the internationalization of the Chinese renminbi has been strongly promoted in recent years. These changes have prompted us to conduct a second questionnaire survey. Our aim is to obtain new evidence of the current and possible future roles of the yen, other Asian currencies, and the U.S. dollar in the context of the growing regional production networks of Japanese firms. We intend to accumulate valuable firm-level data for further data mining on this issue. The findings from this survey will provide us with meaningful policy implications from the standpoint of Japanese manufacturing firms.

Outline of the Survey

Who were surveyed?
18,932 Japanese overseas offices
Survey method
Online survey (request letters sent by postal)
Survey period
November 14, 2014 – January 19, 2015
Number of respondent firms
1,154 firms (Effective response rate:6.1%)