Biofuel and Food-Commodity Prices

Agriculture

Gal Hochman¹  Scott Kaplan³  Deepak Rajagopal² 

[1] Department of Agriculture, Food, and Resource Economics, Rutgers University, 55 Dudley Rd., New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USAInstitute of Environment, University of California Los-Angeles, La Kretz Hall, Suite 300, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA;Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics, University of California Berkeley, 207 Giannini Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA;

关键词: biofuels;    commodity-food prices;    economic growth;    energy prices;    exchange rate;   

DOI  :  10.3390/agriculture2030272

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The paper summarizes key findings of alternative lines of research on the relationship between food and fuel markets, and identifies gaps between two bodies of literature: one that investigates the relationship between food and fuel prices, and another that investigates the impact of the introduction of biofuels on commodity-food prices. The former body of literature suggests that biofuel prices do not affect food-commodity prices, but the latter suggests it does. We try to explain this gap, and then show that although biofuel was an important contributor to the recent food-price inflation of 2001–2008, its effect on food-commodity prices declined after the recession of 2008/09. We also show that the introduction of cross-price elasticity is important when explaining soybean price, but less so when explaining corn prices.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2012 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.