Vibrant agricultural commodity exchanges will greatly enhance the performance of Africa’s agricultural sectors and contribute to overall economic development. Yet specific conditions in grain markets are required for agricultural commodity exchanges to develop.1 The absence or short-lived...

This paper develops, calibrates, and runs a new food price crisis monitoring framework. The proposed framework has an integrated approach to capture global and national vulnerabilities and offers an alternative to existing food insecurity information systems, which suffer from a lack of...

Commodity associations are organizations that bring together a wide spectrum of interest groups related to a particular commodity or sector in a particular country, whether for export, for the domestic market, or for both. Such associations can have, as members, individual farmers or their...

This paper highlights the thinness of rice trade relative to wheat and maize, and the contrasting price volatility and tradability relations for wheat and maize, which display a positive correlation, and for rice, which show an inverse relation. The paper focuses on Southeast Asia, which hosts...

The debate on whether natural disasters cause significant macroeconomic impacts and indeed hinder development is ongoing. Most analyses along these lines have focused on impacts on gross domestic product. This paper looks beyond this standard national accounting aggregate, and examines whether...

East Asia has experienced a dramatic decrease in output growth volatility over the past 20 years. This is good news, as output growth volatility affects poor households because of coping strategies that have long-term, harmful consequences, and the overall economy through its negative impact on...

This paper analyzes the drivers and consequences of sudden stops of capital flows. It focuses on the impact of external vulnerability on the depth and length of sudden stop crises. The authors analyze 43 developing and developed countries between 1993 and 2006. They find evidence that external...