Production Shocks Exports And Market Prices

Since 2012/13, rice exports to China (which may have reached two million tons in 2015/16) boosted total demand for Myanmar’s rice and rice prices. In mid-2016, however, China stopped rice imports through the main land entry point, putting substantial downward pressure on prices. Analysis presented in this paper, based on econometric estimates of consumption parameters and a simple model of Myanmar’s rice supply and demand, suggests that market prices would fall by 26 to 43 percent or more (in real terms) in the absence of increased exports to the world market and/or government domestic procurement. Such a decline in prices could have seriously harmed Myanmar’s rice producers, including many poor farmers with marketable surpluses. Model simulations suggest that government procurement of about one million tons would limit the estimated price decline to only 17 to 30 percent. Further refinements in the simulations are needed to take account for the seasonal nature of paddy production in Myanmar, possible price-responsiveness of export demand and the effects of changes in paddy incomes on farmer demand for rice. Medium-term analysis of procurement, storage and future sales is needed to analyze fiscal costs under various scenarios, as well, covering alternative shocks to production, export demand and world prices. Nonetheless, the main results are clear: without substantial market interventions on the order of one million tons (milled rice equivalent), the paddy (rice) price could fall dramatically when production increases or export demand declines.

Many emerging economies depend on commodities whose prices are volatile. High prices for these commodities naturally help those sectors related to the production of the commodities, but the economic benefits for other sectors are ambiguous. These effects can be different according to the characteristics of the sector, leading to a positive or negative sectoral effect depending on several features. Also, commodity price shocks may affect spending differently according to the characteristics of the population. A feature prevalent in many emerging economies is a low degree of banking penetration, which can affect the magnitude of commodity shocks, because banking services are related to how people save and borrow, affecting their ability to smooth spending when they face income shocks. This dissertation studies the effects of commodity price shocks in exporting economies, analyzing the overall and sectoral effects, as well as the regional effects according to access to banking services among inhabitants. The first chapter analyzes the effect of commodity price fluctuations on both overall and sectoral outcomes in a commodity-exporting economy. Using Chilean and international copper market data, I find positive copper price changes stemming from copper-specific demand shocks generate a broad GDP expansion with no visible decline in the exports of any sector, including manufacturing. These results provide evidence against the Dutch disease hypothesis involving the crowding out effect of commodity price increases on the manufacturing sector. The second chapter studies how features of a commodity-exporting economy such as the degree of substitution between domestic and foreign goods, the income effect on labor supply, and trade policy related to tariffs on imports shape overall and sectoral effects of commodity price shocks. For that, I estimate key structural parameters of a small open economy business-cycle model with 6 sectors by matching my empirical impulse responses and find that a low degree of substitution between domestic and foreign goods explains the positive sectoral effect of a commodity price shock. Then, I evaluate how tariffs on imports shape the effect of commodity price shocks and find low tariffs make the small open economy less sensitive to commodity price shocks when the elasticity of substitution between domestic goods and imports is small. The third chapter studies the relationship between access to banking services and the magnitude of external shocks. Using quarterly data of the number of checking and savings bank accounts per person as an indicator of access to banking services, I analyze the effects of commodity price changes conditional on the number of bank accounts per person across Mexican states. I find decreases in commodity prices generate a bigger contraction in total production in states with low numbers of bank accounts per person. A rise in commodity prices generates a bigger expansion of the number of formal workers as well as a wider contraction in the number of informal workers in regions with a low number of bank accounts per person

When analyzing terms-of-trade shocks, it is implicitly assumed that the economy responds symmetrically to changes in export and import prices. Using a sample of developing countries our paper shows that this is not the case. We construct export and import price indices using commodity and manufacturing price data matched with trade shares and separately identify export price, import price, and global economic activity shocks using sign and narrative restrictions. Taken together, export and import price shocks account for around 40 percent of output fluctuations but export price shocks are, on average, twice as important as import price shocks for domestic business cycles.

We employ a set of sign restrictions on the generalized impulse responses of a Global VAR model, estimated for 38 countries/regions over the period 1979Q2–2011Q2, to discriminate between supply-driven and demand-driven oil-price shocks and to study the time profile of their macroeconomic effects for different countries. The results indicate that the economic consequences of a supply-driven oil-price shock are very different from those of an oil-demand shock driven by global economic activity, and vary for oil-importing countries compared to energy exporters. While oil importers typically face a long-lived fall in economic activity in response to a supply-driven surge in oil prices, the impact is positive for energy-exporting countries that possess large proven oil/gas reserves. However, in response to an oil-demand disturbance, almost all countries in our sample experience long-run inflationary pressures and a short-run increase in real output.

Changing Patterns of Global Trade outlines the factors underlying important shifts in global trade that have occurred in recent decades. The emergence of global supply chains and their increasing role in trade patterns allowed emerging market economies to boost their inputs in high-technology exports and is associated with increased trade interconnectedness.The analysis points to one important trend taking place over the last decade: the emergence of China as a major systemically important trading hub, reflecting not only the size of trade but also the increase in number of its significant trading partners.

Commodity export dependency confers ex post shocks and ex ante uncertainty upon producing countries. What reduces growth is not the prospect of volatile world prices, but the actual realization of negative shocks.Dehn estimates the effects on growth of commodity price shocks and uncertainty within an established empirical growth model. Ex post shocks and ex ante uncertainty have been treated in the empirical literature as if they were synonymous. But they are distinct concepts and it is both theoretically and empirically inappropriate to treat them as synonymous.He shows that the interaction between policy and aid is robust to the inclusion of variables capturing commodity price movements. More important, his approach departs in three ways from earlier empirical studies of the subject:- It deals with issues of endogeneity without incurring an excessive loss of efficiency.- It defines the dependent variable to allow an assessment of the longer-term implications of temporary trade shocks.- It imposes no priors on how commodity price movements affect growth, but compares and contrasts a range of competing shock and uncertainty specifications.Dehn resolves the disagreement about the long-run effect of positive shocks on growth, finding that positive shocks have no long-run impact on growth (that windfalls from trade shocks do not translate into sustainable increases in income).He shows that negative shocks have large, highly significant, and negative effects on growth, but that commodity price uncertainty does not affect growth.This paper - a product of Rural Development, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to analyze the impact of commodity price risks on developing economies. The author may be contacted at [email protected].

The effect that the recent decline in the price of oil has had on growth is far from clear, with many observers at odds to explain why it does not seem to have provided a significant boost to the world economy. This paper aims to address this puzzle by providing a systematic analysis of the effect of oil price shocks on growth for 72 countries comprising 92.8% of world GDP. We find that, on net, shocks driving the oil price in 2015 shaved off 0.2 percentage points of growth for the median country in our sample, and 0.17 percentage points in GDP-weighted terms. While increases in oil supply and shocks to oil-specific demand actually boosted growth in 2015 (by about 0.2 and 0.4 percentage points, respectively), weak global demand more than offset these gains, reducing growth by 0.8 percentage points. Counterfactual simulations for the 72 countries in our sample underscore the importance of diversification, rather than low levels of openness, in shielding against negative shocks to the world economy.

The April 2012 issue of the World Economic Outlook assesses the prospects for the global economy, which has gradually strengthened after a major setback during 2011. The threat of a sharp global slowdown eased with improved activity in the United States and better policies in the euro area. Weak recovery will likely resume in the major advanced economies, and activity will remain relatively solid in most emerging and developing economies. However, recent improvements are very fragile. Policymakers must calibrate policies to support growth in the near term and must implement fundamental changes to achieve healthy growth in the medium term. Chapter 3 examines how policies directed at real estate markets can accelerate the improvement of household balance sheets and thus support otherwise anemic consumption. Chapter 4 examines how swings in commodity prices affect commodity-exporting economies, many of which have experienced a decade of good growth. With commodity prices unlikely to continue growing at the recent elevated pace, however, these economies may have to adapt their fiscal and other policies to lower potential output growth in the future.

Since the mid 2000s, an increasing financialization of commodity futures markets is taking place. This has fueled an ongoing discussion about the effect of financial investments on the development of commodity prices. Against this background, the trading activities of financial speculators also come to the fore. There is the concern that such speculators can cause irrational overshootings of agricultural commodity prices, e.g. in the event of global production shocks. In such an event the decrease of total supply induces a price surge menacing food security in developing countries. Yet, the question emerges whether speculation aggravates this price increase, eventually inducing a price bubble. The relevance of this concern is reinforced by the fact that due to climate change an increased frequency and severity of global agricultural production shortfalls is at stake. If speculation evokes an additional threat to food security in the event of a production shock, the political agenda should not be confined to focus solely on the adaptation to climate change. Instead, it is then also necessary to address speculative activities on agricultural commodity markets. This book scrutinises whether speculative bubbles can be identified in the event of severe global production shocks. For this, a framework for tracing the transmission of the futures price's development on the spot market is developed. Using annual data from 1979-2012 for maize it is analysed whether production shock related price bubbles occurred.