Macroeconomic Effects of Disruptions in Global Food Commodity Markets: Evidence for the United States
研究了全球食品大宗商品供应冲击对美国经济的影响，发现冲击导致食品、能源和核心通胀上升，实际GDP和消费支出持续下降，且非食品消费和投资下降更显著。
We use two approaches to examine the macroeconomic conse quences for the United States of disruptions in global food commodity markets. First, we embed a novel quarterly composite global production index for the four basic staples-corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans-in a standard vector auto regression model, and we estimate the dynamic effects of global food commod ity supply shocks on the U.S. economy. As an alternative, we also estimate the consequences of 13 narratively identified global food commodity price shocks. Both approaches lead to similar conclusions. Specifically, an unfavorable food commodity market shock raises food commodity prices, and leads to a rise in food, energy, and core inflation, and also to a persistent decline in real GDP and consumer expenditures. A closer inspection of the passthrough reveals that households do not only reduce food consumption. In fact, there is a much greater decline in durable consumption and investment. Overall, the macroeconomic effects turn out to be a multiple of the maximum impact implied by the share of food commodities in the consumer price index and household consumption.