We examine the effect of pandemics on selected commodity prices-in particular, those of zinc, copper, lead, and oil. We set up a vector autoregressive model and analyse data since the mid-nineteenth century to determine how prices reacted to pandemics such as the 1918 Spanish Flu, 1957 Asian...

Modelling the underlying long-run trend of metal prices is important, given that selected metals are a source of income for many countries. However, estimating the underlying trend has proven to be difficult, given the persistence and volatility of primary commodity prices-metals are no...

This paper analyzes the transmission from global commodity to domestic food prices for a large set of countries. First, a theoretical model is developed to explain price transmission for different trade regimes. Drawing from the competitive storage model under rational expectations, it is shown...

This study investigates changes in the relationship between oil prices and the US economy from a long-term perspective. Although neither of the two series (oil price and GDP growth rates) presents structural breaks in mean, we identify different volatility periods in both of them, separately....

The paper estimates export demand elasticities for a large number of developing and developed countries, using time-series techniques that account for the nonstationarity in the data. The average long-run price and income elasticities are found to be approximately -1 and 1.5, respectively. Thus,...

This paper derives a structural import demand equation and estimates it for a large number of countries, using recent time series techniques that address the problem of nonstationarity. Because the statistical properties of the different estimators have been derived only asymptotically,...

Evidence-based policy of global warming is best relying on a relevant sample of data. We choose a sample of annual data from 1959 to-date to provide some statistically robust stylized facts about the relationships between actual CO2 and temperature. Visually, there is a clear upward trend in...

For many low-income countries, the impact of structural reforms on economic growth and poverty alleviation crucially depends on the response of aggregate agricultural supply to changing incentives. Despite its policy relevance, the size of this parameter is still largely unknown. This paper...