• Food prices have been rising since 2000, spiked in early 2008, and may remain high for another ten years • Prompt action is needed to protect the poorest and support low-income countries faced by surging import bills • In the medium term, economic and agricultural growth can offset the damage, but this will require more determined efforts to boost food production Soaring food prices pose prob...

paper presents preliminary fi ndings and is being distributed to economists and other interested readers solely to stimulate discussion and elicit comments. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and are not necessarily refl ective of views at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the author. as w...

In a sharp departure from earlier trends, the price of U.S. imports from China rose 6 percent in the 2006-08 period. To explore the forces behind this surprising increase, the authors create a new import index that uses highly disaggregated data to track price developments in different product types. The index reveals that the largest price increases were concentrated in industrial supplies— go...

This paper adopts a simple econometric approach to estimate the effects of exchange rate changes on the rate of inflation in Australia. It uses a mark-up model of price determination, in which output costs are determined by input prices. The analysis suggests that imported cost pressures have been more important in the 1980s than in the 1970s. This may be attributable to increasing openness of ...

In contrast to other EU countries, Cyprus lacks comprehensive health care coverage for its population, thus a significant portion of the population lacks insurance for medicines. Due to the small size of the country and small indigenous pharmaceutical industry, pharmaceuticals are mainly imported. Prices in the private sector are determined based on the ex-factory price from the country of orig...

I n his 1952 A Geometry of International Trade, Nobel Laureate James Meade presented the definitive modern version of the celebrated reciprocaldemand, or offer-curve, diagram of the trade theorist. The diagram features curves depicting alternative quantities of exports and imports countries are willing to trade at all possible prices (see Figure 1). Let two countries, home and foreign, trade tw...

a r t i c l e i n f o to prohibit the import of illegally sourced plant materials and products manufactured from them into the United States and its territories, and to similarly ban their interstate transport. Trade theory suggests that the effect of the new law would be to reduce the flow of illegally sourced fiber into the United States, increasing prices. Monthly U.S. import data on tropica...

Food products account for a significant amount of the Iranian imports. Despite the rising prices of food products over the last two decades, their imports have been increasing too. In this study import demand of the main imported food products is empirically analyzed using Quadratic AIDS. Welfare impacts are measured using compensated variation. The results indicate that all products, except te...

Between 1992 and 2002, the Japanese Import Price Index registered a decline of almost 9 percent and Japan entered a period of deflation. We show that much of the correlation between import prices and domestic prices was due to formula biases. Had the IPI been computed using a pure Laspeyres index like the CPI, the IPI would have hardly moved at all. A Laspeyres version of the IPI would have ris...