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...

nterest in commodity prices as indicators of consumer price inflation has ebbed and flowed with the rise and fall in commodity prices themselves. True to form, as commodity prices have surged in the last two years (Chart 1), interest in their predictive power has returned. Inflation hawks point to an outpouring of studies in the late 1980s showing a strong empirical connection between commodity...

The paper explores the linkage between equity and commodity markets, focusing in particular on its evolution over time. It documents that a country’s equity market value has significant out-of-sample predictive ability for the future global commodity price index for several primary commodity-exporting countries. The out-of-sample predictive ability of the equity market appears around 2000s. The...

Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG's) and Error Correction Models (ECM's) are employed to analyze questions of price discovery between spatially separated commodity markets and the transportation market linking them together. Results from our analysis suggest these markets are highly interconnected but it is the inland commodity market that is strongly influenced by both the transportation and commod...