Do food prices cause political unrest? Throughout history, riots appear to have frequently broken out as a consequence of high food prices. This paper studies the impact of food prices on political unrest using monthly data on food prices at the international level. Because food prices and...

The relationship between farm production costs, producer prices and retail food prices is frequently the subject of research. This study examines the existence of cointegrating relationships between the above variables and their direction of causality. Data used refer to price indices of farm...

Plant-based transportation fuels were the focus of extended criticism in the press, especially during 2008 when a portion of the blame for a spike in global food prices was associated with growth of the United States’ corn ethanol industry. The critique is based on an unsophisticated portrayal...

The general perception is that high food prices in India have increased poverty and that trade reforms will further worsen poverty. We compare Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty measures for various scenarios of grain price swings with and without trade reform, using price and income effects for 32...

A key parameter determining the welfare impact from a world market shock is the transmission elasticity which measures the average domestic response to an international price change. Many studies have estimated price transmission elasticities for a large number of countries but the variation in...

This paper uses copulas to study the relationship between the US dollar (USD) exchange rate and prices for food (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice). A number of different copula specifications with different conditional dependence structures and time-varying dependence parameters were employed in...

This paper analyses how rising agricultural prices affect heterogenous farm production and access to inputs under credit market imperfections in the CEE transition countries. Using the FADN farm level panel data, which contains 37416 observations for 2004 and 2005, we estimate a farm credit...

Commodity price booms are best explained by macroeconomic rather than market-specific factors. I argue that the rise in food prices over 2007 and the first half of 2008 should be seen as part of the wider commodity boom which is largely the result of rapid economic growth in China and throughout...

The economic effects of climate change on agriculture have been widely assessed in the last two decades. Many of these assessments are based on the integration of biophysical and agro-economic models, allowing to understand the physical and socio-economic responses of the agricultural sector to...

This paper shows how a developing country, Lao PDR, imports high glutinous rice prices by exporting its staple food to neighboring countries, Vietnam and Thailand. Lao PDR has extensive export controls on rice, generating a sizable difference between domestic and international prices. Controls...