EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

How Much Did Speculation Contribute to Recent Food Price Inflation?

Vincent Amanor-Boadu and Yacob Zereyesus

No 46841, 2009 Annual Meeting, January 31-February 3, 2009, Atlanta, Georgia from Southern Agricultural Economics Association

Abstract: Recent increases in commodity prices have led to calls for the regulation of speculators. These calls have come from many reputable quarters including leading agricultural and food policy institutions such as International Food Policy Research Institute as well as different members of the U.S. Congress. They are based on an assumption that speculative activities are a primary or major source of the volatility in the markets and that controlling these activities through regulations would bring more stability to the market. The paper tests this hypothesis and assesses the contribution of speculative activities in the commodity markets over the past decade to price inflation. The paper argues that government regulatory policies to control speculation in commodity markets is a second best solution that would probably yield neutral or negative benefits to the very people the policy aims to protect.

Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy; Agricultural Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cba, nep-mon and nep-reg
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/46841/files/Ho ... rice%20Inflation.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:ags:saeana:46841

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.46841

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2009 Annual Meeting, January 31-February 3, 2009, Atlanta, Georgia from Southern Agricultural Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:ags:saeana:46841