The Australian dollar is considered primarily a commodity-based currency. The high level of commodity-based exports in Australia’s trade balance is given as an explanation. Accordingly changes in world commodity prices should bring commensurate changes in the value of the Australian dollar, such that changes in world commodity prices are only partially transmitted to the Australian economy and ...

During the early 1980s, U.S. agriculture underwent its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression in spite of record spending on government agricultural programs. In this chapter we test the hypothesis that the severity of the crisis may have been moderated if agricultural policy had been more flexible. Prior to the 1985 Farm Bill (U.S. Department of Agriculture 1986), agricultural polic...

The law of one price (LOP) plays an important role as a building block in theories of international trade and exchange rate determination. It also serves as a measure of integration for international commodity markets. The LOP states that in competitive markets after adjustment for transportation costs and trade barriers, identical commodities sold in different countries should sell for the sam...

prices of meat in the international and a nation's internal markets tend to be closely related to each other. this relation could be sometimes harmful and due to lagged responses, meat prices at the internal market would subsequently increase as input prices increase at either the internal or international market. price uncertainty and transmition are two important problems facing a nation...

World trade talks have foundered recently, in part due to developing country demands that industrialised countries reduce their large farm support programmes to allow poor farmers in the global South to compete more fairly. But are subsidies really the problem? For some crops – most notably cotton and sugar – Northern subsidies clearly are a root cause of low international prices and unfair com...

Inflation-adjusted farm prices and farm-wholesale marketing margins for beef and pork have declined over several decades. For example, from 1970 to 1998, real slaughter steer and hog prices declined by 50% and 66%, respectively, while real beef and pork farm-wholesale (FW) marketing margins declined by 57% and 65%, respectively (Figures 1 and 2). These changes have been attributed to declining ...