Smoothing Primary Exporters' Price Risks: Bonds, Futures, Options and Insurance.

The costs of primary commodity price instability are reviewed and can be significant. Stabilization is problematic, given high serial correlation. Rolling over a sequence of one-year futures hedges can be quite effective and the optimal hedge is derived but encounters the problem of sovereign default risk. So does international lending and borrowing to smooth consumption. The authors derive the constrained optimal fully state-contingent contract for consumption smoothing of identically independent distributed and first order serially correlated price risks in the absence of enforceable contracts and compare this with more liquid commodity bond options and loan contracts. Copyright 1992 by Royal Economic Society.