THE ROLE OF COMMODITY TERMS OF TRADE IN THE DETERMINATION OF THE REAL EXCHANGE RATES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN COUNTRIES

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether there exists a long‐run relationship between the real exchange rate and the commodity terms of trade in the so‐called Mediterranean or MENA countries. These economies are good candidates for this type of formulation, as are commodity exporting countries. Using cointegration techniques, we find long‐run relationships linking the real exchange rate and a commodity‐based measure of the terms of trade. Therefore, commodity terms of trade are a potential explanation for the apparent nonstationarity of MENA countries’ real exchange rates previously found in the empirical literature.     

China trade: Busting gravity's bounds

Since China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, annual growth rates of its imports and exports have increased, and raised tensions between China and some of its major trading partners. Using a gravity model of trade, we find that China's orientation toward foreign trade is much greater than expected for an economy of its size and level of development. Our analysis shows that China's excessive orientation toward foreign trade (“over-trading”) varies substantially across countries and we consider various explanations for the over-trading. A comparison of China's export boom with the earlier export booms of more market-based East and Southeast Asian economies shows that China's export boom has exceeded earlier booms in magnitude but not in duration. We conclude with a discussion of the likely scale of future export and import flows from and to China.     

为建设开放合作的区域性新兴城市提供环境保证

环保工作越来越成为经济发展工作的重中之重。文章结合广西南宁凤凰纸业有限公司治理环境的工作实际，对工业企业如何在发展经济的同时搞好环保工作进行了探讨。     

人民币汇率变动对中、日农产品贸易影响的实证分析

20世纪70年代布雷顿森林体系崩溃、牙买加体系建立之后,汇率变动成为世界经济中的普遍现象,许多经济学开始从理论上、实际上探讨汇率波动对一国对外贸易的影响。汇率变动将对中日农产品贸易产生深远影响,本文基于2005年1月～2008年11月月度面板数据,进行了实证分析,得出结论。     

外商直接投资对中国商品进出口影响的实证分析

本文采用贸易引力模型,结合混合回归分析与横截面分析两种方法,对1992年至2004年外商对华直接投资对中国商品进出口、出口、进口的影响进行了实证分析。混合回归结果表明,外商对华直接投资对中国商品进出口、出口、进口的增长均存在长期且显著的促进作用,而且这种促进作用存在时滞。横截面分析结果表明,每年外商对华直接投资对于中国商品进出口、出口、进口的促进作用随着时间的推移是波动的,但从总趋势来看,这种促进作用在不断增强。     

Bubbles in food commodity markets: Four decades of evidence

We use daily prices from individual futures contracts to test whether speculative bubbles exist in 12 agricultural markets and to identify whether patterns of bubble behavior exist over time. The samples begin as far back as 1970 and run through 2011. The findings demonstrate that all 12 agricultural markets experienced multiple periods of price explosiveness. However, bubble episodes represent a very small portion—between 1.5 and 2%—of price behavior during the 42-year period. In addition, most bubbles are short-lived with 80–90% lasting fewer than 10 days. Though receiving far less attention, negative bubbles contribute significantly to price behavior, accounting for more than one-third of explosive episodes. Markets over-react during both positive and negative explosive episodes, leading to a correction as they return to a random walk. This adjustment back to fundamental values is most pronounced with positive bubbles particularly in the earlier part of the sample. While the magnitudes of the corrections are generally small, there were a few instances of significant increases in prices and large over-reactions, most notably in the softs (e.g., cocoa 1973, coffee 1994, cotton 2010). We also find that explosive periods did not become more common or last longer in the second half of the sample period and that the most recent bubble episodes may not have been as severe as in mid-1970s.     

国际商品市场与股票市场的溢出效应——基于中美数据的VAR-MGARCH分析

基于VAR-MGARCH-BEKK模型,对国际商品市场与中美股票市场之间的均值与波动溢出效应进行了经验分析。结果表明,国际商品市场与中美股票市场之间存在着相互的均值溢出效应,国际商品市场对中美股票市场存在波动溢出效应,同时,美国股票市场对国际商品市场存在波动溢出效应;另外,中国应该尽快编制科学合理并适合自身国情的商品指数。     

After the tide: Commodity currencies and global trade

The decade prior to the Great Recession saw a boom in global trade and rising transportation costs. High-yielding commodity exporters׳ currencies appreciated, boosting carry trade profits. The Global Recession sharply reversed these trends. We interpret these facts with a two-country general equilibrium model that features specialization in production and endogenous fluctuations in trade costs. Slow adjustment in the shipping sector generates boom–bust cycles in freight rates and, as a consequence, in currency risk premia. We validate these predictions using global shipping data. Our calibrated model explains about 57% of the narrowing of interest rate differentials post-crisis.     

Scale Economies in Cross-Border Shopping and Commodity Taxation

A simple inventory theoretic model of cross-border shopping with transaction and storage costs is developed. Consumers incur fixed transaction and transportation costs to access the foreign market in which a perfect substitute of the domestic good is available. We show that the size of the optimal tax is inversely related to the size of domestic transactions. This result provides a simple example of a more general principle, that is, when there are increasing returns to scale in tax avoidance with respect to the quantities involved, then smaller transactions should be taxed more heavily than larger transactions. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Relative Importance of Stock, Bond and Real Estate Factors in Explaining REIT Returns

This paper examines the link between REIT, financial asset and real estate returns, and tests whether it changed subsequent to the “REIT boom” of the early 1990s. The main focus is on answering the question do REIT returns now better reflect the performance of underlying direct (unsecuritized) real estate? We develop and implement a variance decomposition for REIT returns that separates REIT return variability into components directly related to major stock, bond, and real estate-related return indices, as well as idiosyncratic or sector-specific effects. This is applied to aggregate REIT sector (NAREIT) returns as well as returns to size and property-type based REIT portfolios. Our results show that the REIT market went from being driven largely by the same economic factors that drive large cap stocks through the 1970s and 1980s to being more strongly related to both small cap stock and real estate-related factors in the 1990s. There is also a steady increase over time in the proportion of volatility not accounted for by stock, bond or real estate related factors. We also find that small cap REITs are “more like real estate” compared to larger cap REITs, at least over the 1993–1998 period. We argue that this could be a result of the institutionalization of the ownership of larger cap REITs that took place in the 1990s.