Primary commodities are important exports for Fiji, contributing around 60 to 65 percent to total export receipts. Prices of primary commodities have been very unstable, subject to both secular and temporary fluctuations, which in turn, has given rise to unevenness in the value of export earnings and reserve levels. To date, there has not been any empirical evidence on the influence of commodit...

This paper documents a new " stylized fact " regarding commodity prices using alternative datasets covering the period from 1880 to 1996: The volatility of real commodity prices, defined as nominal commodity prices deflated by the manufacturing unit value index, is higher under flexible-exchange rate regimes than fixed-exchange rate regimes. Furthermore, changes in exchange regime are associate...

nterest in commodity prices as indicators of consumer price inflation has ebbed and flowed with the rise and fall in commodity prices themselves. True to form, as commodity prices have surged in the last two years (Chart 1), interest in their predictive power has returned. Inflation hawks point to an outpouring of studies in the late 1980s showing a strong empirical connection between commodity...

Empiricaf models of commodity prices are potentially important aids to decision-makers, especially as the economy has grown more complex. A typicrd time series of commodity prices exhibks positive autocorrelation, occasional spikes, and random variability, and conceptual models have been developed to explain this behavior. But, the leap from theory to empirical applications is large because of ...

The Australian dollar is considered primarily a commodity-based currency. The high level of commodity-based exports in Australia’s trade balance is given as an explanation. Accordingly changes in world commodity prices should bring commensurate changes in the value of the Australian dollar, such that changes in world commodity prices are only partially transmitted to the Australian economy and ...

Acute volatile movements in primary commodity prices have drawn enough interests from empirical researchers. Exports of these commodities account for the bulk of export earnings of developing countries. The traditional demand based framework has been unable to explain the marked deterioration in these prices during 1980s. This paper tries to ascertain the role played by real oil prices in expla...

The past decade has seen a sharp increase in the level and volatility of commodity prices (Graph 1). This has occurred alongside a sharp increase in commodity demand from emerging market economies, but also in parallel with a rapid increase in both commodity derivatives trading and financial investor activity in commodity markets (Domanski and Heath 2007; Dwyer, Gardner and Williams 2011). That...