Abstract
The high food prices experienced over recent years have led to the widespread view that food price volatility has increased. However, volatility has generally been lower over the two most recent decades than previously. Over the most recent period, volatility has been high but, with the important exception of rice, not out of line with historical experience. There is weak evidence that grains’ price volatility more generally may be increasing.
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Notes
- 1.
In Gilbert and Morgan (2010), we used a GARCH model to address this question.
- 2.
ρ, λ and the three variances \(\sigma _\varepsilon ^2\), \(\sigma _\nu ^2\) and \(\sigma _\kappa ^2\).
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Acknowledgments
This chapter was prepared for an EU Institute for Prospective Technological Studies workshop on Methods to Analyze Price Volatility, Seville, Spain, 28–29 January 2010. It draws on Driver Review DR 18: Food Price Volatility prepared for the UK’s Foresight Food and Farming Review. We are grateful to DEFRA for comments on the initial draft. The views expressed are, however, those of the authors and not of DEFRA.
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Gilbert, C.L., Morgan, C.W. (2011). Food Price Volatility. In: Piot-Lepetit, I., M'Barek, R. (eds) Methods to Analyse Agricultural Commodity Price Volatility. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7634-5_4
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