This note assesses empirically the role Chinese activity plays in global commodities markets, showing that the strength of China's economic activity has a significant bearing on commodity prices, but that the impact differs across commodity markets, with industrial production shocks having a...

Several empirical studies report the existence of declining terms of trade between commodities and manufactures, supporting the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis. As globalization leads to greater integration of markets, we ask if in a fully integrated economy the terms of trade will display the same...

This paper uses annual data to study the interaction of consumer and commodity prices in 15 economies over the period 1850-1913. We find that consumer price inflation in all 15 countries co-moves with a broad measure of changes in commodity prices. Consumer prices comove most strongly with...

A feature of modern globalization processes is their vulnerability to the volatility of short-term capital flows, which, combined with the growing volatility of commodity prices, have created serious difficulties for the economic policies of commodity-oriented countries. Therefore, the study of...