Agricultural Commodity Markets and Trade: New Approaches to Analyzing Market Structure and Instability
本书汇集17章国际作者的研究，运用时间序列等方法分析农产品价格趋势与波动，探讨市场结构变化及对发展中国家政策干预的启示。
This volume offers the reader two for the price of one. For most topics, the editors offer the reader alternative chapters that provide different views on each topic using state-of-the-art techniques (mostly time-series methods), comprehensive theories or explanations of the changing institutional environment for commodity markets. The broad theme is that understanding price trends and price variability is essential to understanding the underlying workings of agricultural commodity markets and the implications for policy interventions in these markets. The book consists of 17 chapters written by an international set of authors, and edited by two specialists from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. Commodity markets are vitally important for developing countries that depend on the export earnings and face variable expenditures for imports. Commodity prices are reflected in a country's terms of trade and its ultimate fiscal position. The underlying behaviour of these markets results in infrequent price spikes and prolonged market slumps. The first two chapters (Cashin and McDermott, and Gilbert) offer empirical explanations of commodity price behaviour. The authors of these chapters disagree over the existence of long-term trends and the persistence of shocks. The evidence for a long-term negative trend across commodities is mixed, prices appear to have long-lasting shocks with sustained periods, with price below trends, but the shocks do not appear permanent (no unit root problem). The third chapter (Bowman and Husain) forecasts commodity prices with futures price-based models and finds that these models perform better than those based purely on historic price data. These chapters are the most interesting of the volume in that they provide new research that is useful in putting subsequent policy-based chapters in perspective.