Traders Versus the State: Anthropological Approaches to Unofficial Economics is at once both a frustrating book to read and a fascinating book to review. One might suppose from its title that the book deals with conflict between officials on the one hand and those engaged in tradingor merchandising on the other. And one might suppose from reading the subtitle that the book focuses on the activi...

The search for solutions to problems in international commodity trade has been more actively pursued during the past five years than at any previous time in history. Long negotiations in the Kennedy Round were aimed both at tariff questions and at establishing international commodity arrangements. The need for improved commodity trading arrangements was emphasized by developing countries at the...

In this paper, we seek to produce forecasts of commodity price movements that can systematically improve on naïve statistical benchmarks. We revisit how well changes in commodity currencies perform as potential efficient predictors of commodity prices, a view emphasized in the recent literature. In addition, we consider different types of factor-augmented models that use information from a larg...