IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oec/agraaa/54-en.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Structural Change in Commodity Markets: Have Agricultural Markets Become Thinner?

Author

Listed:
  • Peter S. Liapis

    (OECD)

Abstract

It is generally asserted that markets of internationally traded agricultural commodities are thin and more volatile, but with little supporting evidence. For internationally traded agricultural products, it is not clear what constitutes “thin” markets and how this “thinness” contributes to price volatility. Nonetheless, in the current atmosphere of high food and agricultural prices, the sentiment that international prices are more volatile because agricultural markets are thin, is widely shared. This study examines whether selected agricultural markets have become thinner using a particular notion of market thinness relevant for internationally traded goods – exports as a share of production. The results suggest that for most of the commodities examined from 1970 to 2010 the answer is that markets have not become thinner. To support this conclusion, two other measures are used for a robustness check to round out the analysis and provide a multidimensional picture. These two measures are the number of participants (countries) trading in any market and the level of market concentration as revealed by the Herfindahl Index.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter S. Liapis, 2012. "Structural Change in Commodity Markets: Have Agricultural Markets Become Thinner?," OECD Food, Agriculture and Fisheries Papers 54, OECD Publishing.
    • Handle: RePEc:oec:agraaa:54-en
    DOI: 10.1787/5k9fp3zdc1d0-en
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1787/5k9fp3zdc1d0-en
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1787/5k9fp3zdc1d0-en?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bowen Chen & Nelson B. Villoria & Tian Xia, 2020. "Tariff quota administration in China's grain markets: An empirical assessment," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 51(2), pages 191-206, March.
    2. Munisamy Gopinath & Feras A. Batarseh & Jayson Beckman, 2020. "Machine Learning in Gravity Models: An Application to Agricultural Trade," NBER Working Papers 27151, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Kym Anderson, 2016. "Agricultural Trade, Policy Reforms, and Global Food Security," Palgrave Studies in Agricultural Economics and Food Policy, Palgrave Macmillan, number 978-1-137-46925-0, August.
    4. Jonathan Brooks & Alan Matthews, 2015. "Trade Dimensions of Food Security," OECD Food, Agriculture and Fisheries Papers 77, OECD Publishing.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oec:agraaa:54-en. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/tdoecfr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.