Spatial Distribution of the International Food Prices: Unexpected Heterogeneity and Randomness.

ABSTRACT: Global food prices are typically analysed in a time-series framework. We complement this approach by focusing on the spatial price dispersion of the country-pair bilateral trade in the international food trade network (IFTN), for ten relevant commodities. The main purposes are to verify if the Law of One Price (LOP) holds and to investigate the emergence of randomness in the price-formation mechanism. We distinguish between the "internal" variance, which indicates the magnitude of price discrimination, and the "external" variance, that is a measure of price dispersion. We find that, for some commodities, spatial price dispersion is remarkable and persistent over time (i.e., failure of the LOP) and that there exists a strict correlation between price spikes and peaks in

SUBMITTER: Distefano T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6472543 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature