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Commodity Markets (commodity + market)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting83%

Selected Abstracts

Anatomy of a crisis: the causes and consequences of surging food prices

AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, Issue 2008
Derek Headey
Agricultural policy; Commodity markets; Biofuels Abstract Although the potential causes and consequences of recent rising international food prices have attracted widespread attention, many existing appraisals are superficial and/or piecemeal. This article attempts to provide a more comprehensive review of these issues based on the best and most recent research, as well as on fresh theoretical and empirical analysis. We first analyze the causes of the current crisis by considering how well standard explanations hold up against relevant economic theory and important stylized facts. Some explanations turn out to hold up much better than others, especially rising oil prices, the depreciation of the U.S. dollar, biofuels demand, and some commodity-specific explanations. We then provide an appraisal of the likely macro- and microeconomic impacts of the crisis on developing countries. We observe a large gap between macro and micro factors, which, when identifying the most vulnerable countries, often point in different directions. We conclude with a brief discussion of what ought to be learned from this crisis. [source]

Employment Policy, the Crowding-out Effect and Imperfect Competition

LABOUR, Issue 4 2001
Juin-jen Chang
This paper presents a macroeconomic model with imperfect competition in the commodity market, and uses it to address how the commodity market's structure is related to the efficacy of government employment policies. It is found that job creation in the public sector may lead to a decrease in output and an increase in prices. In particular, these adverse side-effects will be alleviated when competition in the goods market is less perfect. We also find that public-sector job creation definitely has a positive effect on total employment, though it may crowd out private-sector employment. [source]

Autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity in commodity spot prices

JOURNAL OF APPLIED ECONOMETRICS, Issue 2 2001
Stacie Beck
Muth's (1961) rational expectations model of commodity markets implies that inventory carryover creates ARCH processes in prices. The model also indicates that the expected price variance is an explanatory variable in price regressions. Hypotheses were tested on price data of twenty commodities using a variation of Engle et al. (1987) ARCH,M technique. An ARCH process was found in storable and not in non-storable commodity data, as expected. However, changes in expected price variance have no significant impact on price. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Market integration in Russia during the transformation years,

THE ECONOMICS OF TRANSITION, Issue 3 2003
Konstantin Gluschenko
Abstract A cross-sectional relationship among Russian regions between price dispersion and per capita income dispersion is used to measure the degree of integration between regional commodity markets. The sequence of cross-sectional estimations for each month of the period spanning 1992 through 2000 provides the temporal pattern of market integration in Russia, yielding an integration trajectory. The regional fragmentation of the national market increased during the early years of transition but integration has subsequently tended to improve notwithstanding occasional deviations from this trend. [source]

The evolution of market integration in Russia

THE ECONOMICS OF TRANSITION, Issue 1 2001
Daniel Berkowitz
We use a statistical model of commodity trade to measure the extent of integration between regional commodity markets within Russia. Monthly time-series data on regional commodity prices spanning 1994 through 1999 indicate substantial fluctuations in integration over this period: an initial period of widespread integration gradually gave way to a period of disconnectedness in 1995 through 1997, which seems to have subsided by mid-1998. These fluctuations exhibit strong statistical relationships with a host of aggregate variables; most notably, internal integration exhibits a strong negative relationship with international trade. [source]

The Protection of Origins for Agricultural Products and Foods in Europe: Status Quo, Problems and Policy Recommendations for the Green Book

THE JOURNAL OF WORLD INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, Issue 6 2009
Adriano Profeta
The protection of geographical indications for agricultural products and foodstuffs is one of the major pillars of the Common European Agricultural Policy and has become an important part of the transition from supporting commodity markets to enabling producers to market goods which satisfy consumer tastes. According to estimates, a total annual sales volume of approximately ,14 bn is generated with protected geographical indications (PGI) and protected designations of origin (PDO). Nevertheless, the increase in utilization of the protection systems made obvious a number of problems in the practical application of the law. The Commission recognized these criticisms and announced a discussion on the regulation that was to commence officially in the autumn of 2008 with a Green Book about the PDO/PGI protection regime. In this context, the most recent problems are discussed and proposals are made that should be taken into account in order to accomplish the main goals of the regulation. Therefore this article is addressed to agricultural policy makers, consumer associations, as well as food producers and producer associations in Europe in order to provide a starting point for the Green Book debate. [source]