Most economists congregate on the idea that commodity price instability should be reduced. Since at least one century a variety of instruments have been designed to that end, without much success, especially for agricultural commodities. The failure might be a consequence of the fact that most policies have neglected the reason for price fluctuations. Commodity price fluctuations are endogenous, caused by the market equilibrium local dynamic instability. It means that any measure relying on the “law of large numbers” is likely to be inoperative. In addition, because, in agriculture, the production function is homogenous and of degree one, any effective stabilisation leads to over production. Only production quotas can cope with these difficulties. They may be designed in such a way as to maintain the essential feature of market equilibrium, i.e. marginal cost equating price.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Risk and Insurance with number
0505001.
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)