We assess the impact of the opium trade on the economies of colonial Malaya, Netherlands Indies, and China from 1873 to 1911 using a new database of stock and commodity prices, plus measures of government revenues, commodity exports, and immigration. Stock returns for a few Malayan industries related to international trade are significantly correlated with opium price changes, as are prices for...

Acute volatile movements in primary commodity prices have drawn enough interests from empirical researchers. Exports of these commodities account for the bulk of export earnings of developing countries. The traditional demand based framework has been unable to explain the marked deterioration in these prices during 1980s. This paper tries to ascertain the role played by real oil prices in expla...

Commodity currency literature recently stressed the importance of commodity prices as a determinant of real exchange rates in developing countries (Cashin, Cespedes and Sahay 2004). We provide new empirical evidence on this issue by focusing on countries which are specialized in the ex-port of one leading commodity. For those countries, we investigate to which extent their real exchange rate is...

As a result of storability restrictions, the price risk management of flow commodities (such as natural gas, oil, and electrical power) is by no means a trivial matter.To protect price spikes, consumers purchase diverse swing– type contracts, whereas contract writers try to hedge themselves by appropriate physical assets, for instance, using storage utilities, through transmission and/or produc...

Price risk management for flow commodities (such as natural gas, oil, and electrical power) is not trivial due to restrictions on storability of the underlying. To be protected against price spikes, consumers purchase diverse swing–type contracts, whereas contract writers try to hedge them by appropriate physical assets, for instance, by storage utilities, by transmission and/or production capa...