The global spread of the corona virus is a massive challenge for countries in the Global South. Beyond the health crisis, many countries face economic turmoil linked to their dependence on commodities. Commodity markets have reacted strongly to the COVID-19 crisis with drastic price movements...

We use two approaches to examine the macroeconomic consequences of disruptions in global food commodity markets. First, we embed a novel quarterly composite global production index for the four basic staples (corn, wheat, rice and soybeans) in a standard vector autoregression (VAR) model, and we...

Utilising a comprehensive sample of U.S. and Chinese macroeconomic news announcements, we determine that volatility in commodity prices is significantly impacted by news regarding U.S. economic output (Industrial Production) and Chinese producer prices (PPI). Much of this effect appears to be...

SARS-Cov-2 was first reported in Wuhan, a town in Hubei Province of China with a population of 11 million in December 2019, following an outbreak of non-pneumonia a clear cause. The virus has now spread across the globe to more than 200 countries and territories, and the world health...

Using quarterly data on four commodity exporting countries, we study the explanatory power of real commodity prices for predicting real effective exchange rates, with special attention to the separate roles of different sectoral commodity prices during alternative time periods. We find that the...