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Agricultural Commodity Price Shocks and Their Effect on Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Listed author(s):
  • Addison, Tony
  • Ghoshray, Atanu

Abstract

Commodity price shocks are an important type of external shock and are often cited as a problem for economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper quantifies the impact of agricultural commodity price shocks using a near vector autoregressive model. The novel aspect of this model is that we define an auxiliary variable that can potentially capture the definition of a price shock that allows us to determine whether the response of per capita Gross domestic product (GDP) growth in sub-Saharan Africa to these price shocks is asymmetric. We find that there is evidence of such asymmetric responses to commodity price shocks.

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File URL: https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/WP2013-098.pdf
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Paper provided by World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER) in its series WIDER Working Paper Series with number 098.

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Length: 21
Date of creation: 2013
Handle: RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp2013-098
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Keywords: Agriculture; Econometric models (Economic development); Macroeconomics;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
  • E30 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)
  • F40 - International Economics - - Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance - - - General
  • O11 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Macroeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

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Cited by:

  1. Werner Kristjanpoller & Josephine E. Olson & Rodolfo I. Salazar, 2016. "Does the commodities boom support the export led growth hypothesis? Evidence from Latin American countries," Latin American Economic Review, Springer;Centro de Investigaciòn y Docencia Económica (CIDE), vol. 25(1), pages 1-13, December.

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