The role played by “speculators” during the 2007/08 food price spike is lively disputed. Our analysis focuses on the increasing participation of index funds in agricultural commodity futures markets before the food price spike. Our central theme is to determine if their prespike massive...

Drawing on the method developed by Just and Pope (1978, 1979), this paper separately analyzes the marginal contributions of both regular input factors and climate factors to mean output and to production risk in Chinese inland aquaculture. Furthermore, the net change in output following a 1°C...

The paper develops a procedure for decomposing changes in agricultural price gaps, defined as the difference between a commodity's domestic producer and border prices. Two decomposition approaches are presented, depending on whether policy allows transmission from changes in trade prices and...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how consumers in Canada, like those in the United States and Europe, have changed over the last ten years and the impact this is having on how agricultural commodities are being produced, transformed, distributed and traded. It will also be important to...

Recent global food price developments have spurred renewed interest in analyzing integration of local markets to global markets. A popular approach to quantify market integration is cointegration analysis. However, local market price data often has missing values, outliers, or short and...