초록 열기/닫기 버튼
In the last thirty years the price of rice has been extremely volatile and most likely it has been driven not only by supply and demand but also by other external economic forces. Since a highly volatile rice price constitutes a serious threat to the lives of millions of poor in the Asian and African continents, this paper aims at investigating one of the main mechanisms believed to be at the basis of rice price formation, that is to say the impact of oil shocks on the rice market. A vector autoregression representation of world rice market and oil shocks is estimated. Oil shocks are treated as endogenous and are structurally divided into crude oil production shocks and crude oil price shocks. Rice market is represented by world rice supply and by Thai export price of rice. On the basis of the VAR model results, it is possible to notice that the linkage between oil and the rice market has been changing deeply since the late nineties, since rice market variables responds differently to the same oil shocks in different time periods. Our results show that the impact of oil prices on the price of rice is relevant in both the short and the long run, and its magnitude has been strengthening over the years. Moreover, the main channel of transmission seems not to be a disruption in rice supply caused by higher production costs. Finally, unexpected signs of response of rice supply and prices to rice market shocks confirm that the presence of an oligopoly between rice exporters, and governments‘ interventions have been having a relevant destabilizing effect on the market.
