The price of crude oil in the U.S. never exceeded $40 per barrel until mid-2004. By 2006 it reached $70, and in July 2008 it peaked at $145. By late 2008 it had plummeted to about $30 before increasing to $110 in 2011. Are speculators at least partly to blame for these sharp price changes? We clarify the effects of speculators on commodity prices. We focus on crude oil, but our approach can be ...

Carbon taxes have largely been discussed as individual country measures (even if taken simultaneously) aimed to reduce carbon emissions, slow global warning, and internalizing the externalities associated with carbon generating activities, such as power generation. There has however been little emphasis on the incentives for subgroups of countries to jointly peruse carbon taxes. Yet for large i...

We propose and investigate a new channel through which the resource curse a stylized fact that countries rich in natural resources grow slower operates. Predatory governments are more likely to expropriate corporate profits in natural resource industries when the price of resources is higher. Corporations whose profits are more dependent on the price of resources can mitigate the risk of exprop...

â â â  â â â  abstract â  using a structural var with block exogeneity, diagonality and identifying restrictions, this paper analyzes: first, the macroeconomic linkages among the oil price, u.s. output, interest rate, money supply, general price level and exchange rate and second, the relationships of the macroeconomic variables with the price indices of ten international nonfuel commodity grou...

This paper tests empirically the Dutch disease macroeconomic dynamics in a set of oil exporting countries. Accordingly, this study was put forth to provide an assessment of the Dutch disease symptoms, by focusing on the link between macroeconomic instability indicators and economic growth. To this end, we assess the risk to real exchange rate, government spending and price stability from the oi...

This paper evaluates the weak-form efficiency of the crude oil markets using the artificial neural network (ANN) model. Based on the daily historical data of the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil spot price over the period (02 January 198631 December 2013), the model was trained using backpropagation algorithm. The output of the neural network represents the predicted prices which are con...

International Trade and its Effects on Economic Growth in China International trade, as a major factor of openness, has made an increasingly significant contribution to economic growth. Chinese international trade has experienced rapid expansion together with its dramatic economic growth which has made the country to target the world as its market. This research discusses the role of internatio...

this study analyzes the contribution of the sectoral total factor productivity growth (tfpg) and the input's growth to the iran's economy sectors growth during 1345 -1383. the major findings show that the average contribution of tfp growth to non-oil output's growth during first, second and third development plans has been 39.5%, 12.2% and 24.8% respectively, amounting to (as est...