Pegs, Prices, and Pass-Through: Exchange-Rate Regimes and Inflation Transmission in Commodity-Exporting Economies

Hard pegs are said to import price stability; floats, to absorb external shocks. Both claims are comparative, yet most evidence comes from single-regime settings. This paper estimates regime differences in inflation transmission on an unbalanced annual panel of commodity-dependent economies, 1990–2024; 71 economies pass the pre-registered audit rule, and 64 contribute the 1722 country-year estimation observations. The frozen design interacts a de facto hard-peg indicator with trading-partner inflation, nominal effective exchange-rate (NEER) growth, and a commodity-orthogonal fiscal-stance measure. Partner inflation is strongly associated with domestic inflation everywhere (coefficient about 0.8), with a difference in the regimes that is not measurable, though this null is imprecisely bounded: imported price pressure is the commodity-exporter norm, not a peg phenomenon. The negative NEER–inflation association is about 0.21 points stronger under hard pegs, or 1.4 additional points of inflation per peg-group standard-deviation NEER move, and the differential survives 39 pre-committed variants. It is identified across economies rather than within them, it is concentrated before 2000, and, as targeted decompositions show, it is carried by the CFA franc zone and largely by the 1994 devaluation; outside that zone the hard-peg differential is small and statistically null, matching the within-switcher estimate. The fiscal-stance and state-dependence interactions are tightly bounded nulls.