What Explains the Rise in Food Price Volatility? /

The macroeconomic effects of large food price swings can be broad and far-reaching, including the balance of payments of importers and exporters, budgets, inflation, and poverty. For market participants and policymakers, managing low frequency volatility-i.e., the component of volatility that persis...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Roache, Shaun
Format: Journal
Language:English
Published: Washington, D.C. : International Monetary Fund, 2010.
Series:IMF Working Papers; Working Paper ; No. 2010/129
Online Access:Full text available on IMF
Description
Summary:The macroeconomic effects of large food price swings can be broad and far-reaching, including the balance of payments of importers and exporters, budgets, inflation, and poverty. For market participants and policymakers, managing low frequency volatility-i.e., the component of volatility that persists for longer than one harvest year-may be more challenging as uncertainty regarding its persistence is likely to be higher. This paper measures the low frequency volatility of food commodity spot prices using the spline- GARCH approach. It finds that low frequency volatility is positively correlated across different commodities, suggesting an important role for common factors. It also identifies a number of determinants of low frequency volatility, two of which-the variation in U.S. inflation and the U.S. dollar exchange rate-explain a relatively large part of the rise in volatility since the mid-1990s.
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Physical Description:1 online resource (29 pages)
Format:Mode of access: Internet
ISSN:1018-5941
Access:Electronic access restricted to authorized BRAC University faculty, staff and students