Commodity Price Volatility and World Market Integration since 1700

Review of Economics and Statistics, 2011

269 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Poor countries are more volatile than rich countries, and this volatility impedes their growth. Furthermore, commodity prices are a key source of that volatility. This paper explores price volatility since 1700 to offer three stylized facts: commodity price volatility has not increased over time, commodities have always shown greater price volatility than manufactures, and world market integration breeds less commodity price volatility. Thus, economic isolation is associated with much greater commodity price volatility, while world market integration is associated with less.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b0f1797902f4d8f199e0f7c368913bc37c21a850

Citations in the corpus

• From boom to bust: a typology of real commodity prices in the long run (2013, unknown): “5 treatment of the nexus among commodity price booms and busts, commodity price volatility, and economic growth (Jacks et al., 2011; Ploeg and Poelhekke, 2009).”
• Dealing with Dutch Disease (2010, unknown): “Dutch disease may result in high export concentration in commodities that have exhibited statistically higher price volatility than that of manufacturing products (Jacks, O’Rourke, and Williamson 2009).”
• Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Social Unrest (2015, unknown): “Likewise, figures 2 to 5 plot time series for the IMF’s maize, rice, soybeans, and wheat commdity price series, respectively, and for the count of LexisNexis news stories about food-related social unrest riots between January 1990 and December 2011.”