The Prebisch-Singer Hypothesis: Four Centuries of Evidence

By David I. Harvey, Neil Kellard, Jakob B. Madsen, M. Wohar. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2010

273 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 function, robust to the order of integration of the series, are applied to the data. Results show that eleven price series present a significant and downward trend over all or some fraction of the sample period. In the very long run, a secular, deteriorating trend is a relevant phenomenon for a significant proportion of primary commodities.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2f6f12c08a14097383a4d130f0f8a870893b9d8

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Citations in the corpus

From boom to bust: a typology of real commodity prices in the long run (2013, unknown): “This seems to be true regardless of whether the window of observation runs in the mere handful of decades or across entire centuries (Harvey et al., 2010).”
A Solution to Fiscal Procyclicality: The Structural Budget Institutions Pioneered by Chile (2011, background): “36 The Hotelling (1931) theory of nonrenewable resources says that the decision of whether to leave deposits in the ground or to extract and sell them at today’s price should be governed by an arbitrage condition between the interest rate, on the one hand, and the expected future rate of increase in”
The extractive industries and development: The resource curse at the micro, meso and macro levels (2015, result): “…rich developing countries and the rest of the world (although the trend has been reversed in recent years as a result of the mineral commodities boom; see also the paper by Harvey et al., 2010 that provides evidence in support of the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis over a period of four centuries).”
Natural Resources: Curse or Blessing? (2011, background): “Neo-Marxist policy makers in these countries but also many other economists during the 1970s and 1980s found inspiration from the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis, namely the secular decline of world prices of primary exports (Harvey et al., 2010), to attempt to avoid resource dependency through state-led”
Hegemonic transitions and global shifts in social metabolism: Implications for resource-rich countries. Introduction to the special section (2012, result): “Contrary to the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis of a secular downward trend in the price of natural resources (Harvey et al., 2010), since 2000 the terms of trade have improved for the resource exporting countries (although one could argue that high export prices hide negative externalities unaccounted…”