Price Dynamics in Food-Energy Market in China

In this paper we examine price transmission for major agriculture (food) and energy products in China for the years 2004 to 2010. The Error correction model (ECM) and the directed acyclic graphs (DAG) are applied to identify price dynamics among these six variables: rice, wheat, corn, coal, crude oil and ethanol. Our major contribution to the existing literature lies in two perspectives: 1) We firstly employ the error correction model with directed acyclic graphs to study the price dynamics in the food-energy sector in China. The advantage of this approach is that it can offer data-determined (as opposed to a subjectively-determined) pattern for the contemporaneous causal flows which are then used to conduct a more reliable innovation accounting analysis of the ECM shocks. 2) We uncover a recent price transmission among major food-energy markets in China and provide a broad understanding of price adjustments across markets. The result indicates that in the short run, crop price is driving the energy price, while in the long run, crude oil is the leading factor that drives food and other energy prices. We also find that ethanol price is neither in the long-run equilibrium nor responding to deviation from long-run equilibrium. It supports that under the current policy, Chinese government has done well to prevent the ethanol price driving up the food price. The biofuel production is not the cause of rising food price in China.