In this paper we seek to produce forecasts of commodity price movements that can systematically improve on naive statistical benchmarks, and revisit the forecasting performance of changes in commodity currencies as efficient predictors of commodity prices, a view emphasized in the recent...

The persistently high rate of unemployment has probably been Western Europe's most important economic problem of the 1970s and 1980s. Average unemployment rose relentlessly between the early seventies and the mid-eighties, in contrast to the United States, where unemployment has displayed a...

Originally propounded by the 16th-century scholars of the University of Salamanca, the concept of purchasing power parity (PPP) was revived in the interwar period in the context of the debate concerning the appropriate level at which to re-establish international exchange rate parities. Broadly...

Does faster economic growth increase pressure for democratic change, or reduce it? Using data for 154 countries for the period 1963-2007, we examine the short-run relationship between economic growth and moves toward and away from greater democracy. To address the potential endogeneity of...

We introduce learning into a Hotelling model of a non-renewable resource market. By combining learning and scarcity we add significantly to the dynamics implied by learning and substantially enhance the volatility of commodity prices. In our learning model we show how a self confirming...

The origins of stagflation and the possibility of its recurrence continue to be an important concern among policymakers and in the popular press. It is common to associate the origins of the Great Stagflation of the 1970s with the two major oil price increases of 1973/74 and 1979/80. This paper...

We estimate an aggregate econometric model of the industrial economies using annual data drawn from the postwar period. The model includes equations for GDP, inflation, interest rates and non-oil commodity prices. GDP and inflation reflect the evolution of aggregate supply and demand while...

Poor countries are more volatile than rich countries, and we know this volatility impedes their growth. We also know that commodity price volatility is a key source of those shocks. This paper explores commodity and manufactures prices over the past three centuries to answer three questions: Has...

This paper presents a structural dynamic factor model of a small commodity-exporting economy using Canada as a representative case study. Combining large panel data sets of the global and Canadian economies, we first identify those demand and supply shocks that explain most of the volatility in...

We provide evidence that fiscal policy in resource-rich countries is strongly procyclical. The empirical analysis reveals that on average real government consumption in these countries tends to significantly rise (fall) in good (bad) times. To control for endogeneity we use an instrumental...