EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Long-Run Behavior of Commodity Prices: Small Trends and Big Variability

Paul Cashin () and C. John McCDermott
Additional contact information
C. John McCDermott: International Monetary Fund

IMF Staff Papers, 2002, vol. 49, issue 2, 2

Abstract: Using the longest dataset publicly available (The Economist's index of industrial commodity prices), we analyze the behavior of real commodity prices over the period 1862-1999 and have two main findings. First, while there has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of about 1 percent per year over the last 140 years, little support is found for a break in the long-run trend decline in commodity prices. Second, there is evidence of a ratcheting up in the variability of price movements. The amplitude of price movements increased in the early 1900s, while the frequency of large price movements increased after the collapse of the Bretton Woods regime of fixed exchange rates in the early 1970s. Although there is a downward trend in real commodity prices, this is of little practical policy relevance, since it is smalll and completely dominated by the variability of prices. Copyright 2002, International Monetary Fund

JEL-codes: E32 Q11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (154)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/External/Pubs/FT/staffp/2002/02/pdf/cashin.pdf main text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Long-Run Behavior of Commodity Prices: Small Trends and Big Variability (2001) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:imfstp:v:49:y:2002:i:2:p:2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/41308/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in IMF Staff Papers from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:pal:imfstp:v:49:y:2002:i:2:p:2