Energy and agricultural commodities and markets have been examined extensively, albeit separately, for a number of years. In the energy literature, the returns, volatility and volatility spillovers (namely, the delayed effect of a returns shock in one asset on the subsequent volatility or...

In economics and finance, speculative bubbles take the form of locally explosive dynamics that eventually collapse. We propose a test for the presence of speculative bubbles in the context of mixed causal-noncausal autoregressive processes. The test exploits the fact that bubbles are...

We measure the impact of low cost transport by rail in Malawi on the dispersion of agricultural commodities prices across markets, by exploiting the quasi experimental design of the nearly total collapse of domestic trade by rail in January 2003, due to the destruction of a railway bridge at...

Climate change is a serious concern worldwide. Policy research on climate change in the past decades has largely focused on applied modelling exercises. However, the implications of specific policy strategies such as the clean development mechanism (CDM) for global and regional economic and...

We argue that the failure to disentangle the evolution of the Canadian currency from the U.S. currency leads to potentially incorrect conclusions regarding the case of Dutch disease in Canada. We propose a new approach that is aimed at extracting both currency components and energy- and...

Russian agriculture in transition (1991-1998) was characterised by a production collapse due to aloss in quality and quantity of acreage, disinvestments, falling purchasingpower, and increasedimports. Neither traditional agriculture nor the nascent family farm sector havebeen able to ensure...

Following formal privatisation of farm land and assets in CentralEurope, the change in agriculturalproduction structures has been both more limited and different thanwas initially expected. In this paper, thetheoretical reasons underlying those expectations are reviewed. Analternative...

This paper addresses the interplay between economic growth, energy use, change in sectoral composition and technological change, by exploring trends in energy- and labour productivity development for 14 OECD countries and four sectors over the period 1970-1997. A cross-country decomposition...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of decoupling economic growth and energy use and its various determinants by exploring trends in energy- and labour productivity across 10 manufacturing sectors and 14 OECD countries for the period 1970-1997. We explicitly aim to trace back aggregate...