After experiencing a boom during the mid-1990s, the performance of Uganda's coffee industry has been disappointing. Most existing analyses see the sector's problems as quality deterioration, poor marketing position in the global market, weak regulatory framework, and poor infrastructure....

Previous sharp oil price declines have been accompanied by elevated ex post volatility. In contrast, volatility was much less elevated during the oil price crash in 2014/15. This paper provides evidence that oil prices declined in a relatively measured manner during 2014/15, with dispersion of...

Income growth in emerging economies has often been cited as a key driver of the past decade's com-modity price boom-the longest and broadest boom since World War II. This paper shows that income has a negative and highly significant effect on real food commodity prices, a finding that is...

This study quantifies the relationship between Tanzanian and external maize markets while also accounting for domestic influences. It concludes that external influences on domestic prices originate from regional, rather than global, markets. It also shows that, compared to external factors,...

After 2005, commodity prices experienced their longest and broadest boom since World War II. Agricultural prices have now come down considerably since their 2011 peak, but are still 40 percent higher in real terms than their 2000 lows. This paper briefly addresses the main arguments on the...

This note re-examines the energy/nonenergy price link. Using annual data from the period 1960 to 2008, it finds that the pass-through of energy price changes to the overall nonenergy commodity index is 0.28. At a more disaggregated level, the fertilizer index exhibited the largest pass-through...

This paper is based on a detailed assessment of cotton sector performance in nine countries of West-Central Africa (WCA) and East and Southern Africa (ESA): Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Mali, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The paper builds on earlier work in ESA by Poulton...

This article analyses the performance of cotton sectors across East, Southern, and West Africa, paying particular attention to the wide diversity of institutional arrangements that they now exhibit. It finds strong support for earlier contentions regarding trade-offs between competition and...