The Prebisch-Singer hypothesis is often popularised as implying a declining long-run trend in primary commodity prices relative to manufactures, and conventional datasets to examine the hypothesis typically commence at the beginning of the 20th century. Theoretical rationales include the...

We employ a unique data set and new time-series techniques to reexamine the existence of trends in relative primary commodity prices. The data set comprises 25 commodities and provides a new historical perspective, spanning the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. New tests for the trend...