Returning to an external debate: the terms of trade for commodities in the twentieth century

Jose Antonio Ocampo and Mariangela Parra Lancourt

Series Históricas from Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL)

Abstract: Abstract This paper looks at the evolution of the terms of trade between commodities and manufactures in the twentieth century. A statistical analysis of the relative price series for 24 commodities and of eight indices reveals a significant deterioration in their barter terms of trade over the course of the twentieth century. This decline was neither continuous, nor was it distributed evenly among individual products, however. The data show that the far-reaching changes that the world economy underwent around 1920 and again around 1980 led to a stepwise deterioration which, over the long term, was reflected in a decline of nearly 1% per year in aggregate real prices for raw materials.

Date: 2003-02
Note: Includes bibliography
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repositorio.cepal.org/handle/11362/7797

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:ecr:col048:7797

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Series Históricas from Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Biblioteca CEPAL ().