The prices of 27 internationally traded commodities are decomposed into transitory and permanent shocks by applying an ideal band-pass filter to monthly data from 1970-2020. The two types of shocks contributed roughly equally to price variations, but with wide heterogeneity. Permanent shocks...

Commodity markets are integral to the global economy. Understanding what drives developments of these markets is critical to the design of policy frameworks that facilitate the economic objectives of sustainable growth, inflation stability, poverty reduction, food security, and the mitigation of...

Following four years of relative stability at around $105 per barrel, oil prices have declined sharply since June 2014. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the sources of the recent decline in prices, and examines its macroeconomic, financial and policy implications. The recent drop...

Following an 8-year long dispute over cotton subsidies, Brazil and the United States signed a Memorandum of Understanding on April 21, 2010, effectively paving the way for settling the dispute. This paper argues that cotton subsidies are just the tip of the iceberg while a number of other,...

This paper reviews the literature of price linkages and examines the degree to which cotton prices are linked; it also tests whether such linkages have improved over the last decade. It concludes that the degree of linkage has improved over the last decade while the main source of this improvement...

Tea, one of Tanzania's major export crops, contributes about $30 million to the country's export earnings and provides employment to some 50 000 families. Despite the sector's early success, nationalisation of two estates along with neglect of the smallholder sector made it clear that only...

During the past decade, cotton prices remained considerably below other agricultural prices (although they recovered toward the end of 2010). Yet, between 2000-04 and 2005-09 world cotton production increased 13 percent. This paper conjectures that biotechnology-induced productivity improvements...

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...