Understanding the resource curse (or blessing) across national and regional scales: Theory,empirical challenges and an application

The relationship between resource extraction activity and economic growth has been widely studied in the literature, and the resource curse hypotheses emerged as a theory to explain the effects of resource windfalls on national economies. However, within countries, resource booms and busts can have distinctive effects across local economies, as extractive regions face particular economic consequences unlikely to be observed in nonresource regions. Empirically, most studies analysing the resource curse have relied on cross‐country models to estimate effects and inform policy; however, the use of regional – within‐country – analysis has gained attention from scholars lately, promoted by two advantages: it avoids unobserved country heterogeneities confounding economic outcomes caused by resources and exploits the subnational quasi‐natural experimental conditions generated by endowments. This paper contributes to the resource curse literature by discussing its theoretical causes across scale (regional vs. national effects) and highlighting the empirical challenges involved in the analysis of mining economic impacts across regions. We complement the discussions by econometrically modelling economic growth across nonmetropolitan substate regions of Australia during a period of resource windfalls, finding that in most cases, resources have been a blessing for local economies, although negative effects have also been experienced in parts of the country.     

经济全球化背景下国家矿产资源安全研究——基于自由贸易理论及我国当前贸易结构和贸易形势的考量

矿产资源贸易出于需求,而表现为价格差异导致.伴随经济全球化过程,掩盖在自由贸易体制下世界各主要工业国对矿产资源的争夺,是矿产资源在世界范围内配置的实质.获得商品定价权是取得矿产资源贸易有利地位的关键,从而提高本国矿产资源的安全程度.本文基于自由贸易理论,结合我国当前的贸易结构和贸易形势,研究我国矿产资源安全的现状,进而对确保矿产资源安全提出相应的对策建议.     

资源性商品价格暴涨原因探析

近年来,促使资源性商品价格暴涨的原因可从根本原因、物质原因、金融原因、技术原因以及基础性支撑原因等几个方面进行分析,这些因素在近期仍将存在,将继续支撑资源性商品价格上涨.     

商品原油交接中计量纠纷的技术对策

本文从近年发生的原油计量纠纷的产生原因入手,分析它们产生计量示值量差的技术成因,探讨通过现场实验和标定方法量化出差量、公正地处理争议的途径.为实现科学的、公平的和准确的交易,营造一个良好的商品原油交接的市场氛围.     

Exchange market pressure and primary commodity – exporting emerging markets

This paper studies short-term sensitivity between exchange market pressure and various domestic and external factors in primary commodity-exporting emerging markets. The paper focuses on the top country-commodity groups in sugar, cereal, fuels, ores and coffee during the pre-peak and post-peak commodity price periods across floating and pegged exchange rate regimes, using the price of crude oil as a general benchmark. Employing a panel model and panel VAR analysis, the paper finds the heterogeneity of response patterns unique to country-commodity groups and exchange rate regimes. According to the results, in flexible regimes, volatility occurs via the foreign exchange market, interest rates, and domestic credit cycles, feeding into the social costs for structurally weaker economies. Hard exchange-rate pegs often result in a drain on international reserves as the terms of trade deteriorate following post-price peaks, leading to unpopular depreciation. These results accentuate concerns over uneven international trade patterns, an open economy’s short-term foreign exchange policy, and speculative capital flows. Such sensitivity has broad implications for macroeconomic balance and the sustainability of implied exchange rate targets in the presence of a foreign exchange constraint across emerging markets.     

Exploiting commodity momentum along the futures curves

This study examines novel momentum strategies in commodities futures markets that incorporate term-structure information. We show that momentum strategies that invest in contracts on the futures curve with the largest expected roll-yield or the strongest momentum earn significantly higher risk-adjusted returns than a traditional momentum strategy, which only invests in the nearest contracts. Moreover, when incorporating conservative transaction costs we observe that our low-turnover momentum strategy more than doubles the net return compared to a traditional momentum strategy.     

Who benefits from an oil boom? Evidence from a unique Alaskan data set

Oil booms have been shown to increase local employment and wages. But these effects reflect the aggregated experience of residents, commuters, and recent migrants alike. This paper takes advantage of a unique data set that identifies a rich set of labor market outcomes by place of residence, rather than by place of work. Exploiting this feature of the data, we examine the effect of a major oil boom on employment and wage outcomes in the North Slope Borough of Alaska. This analysis is juxtaposed with a more conventional one that uses place-of-work data collected from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Using the Synthetic Control Method, we find that the oil boom of the late 2000s significantly increased non-residential employment. While the boom caused residential employment to shift from the public to the private sector, total residential employment was unaffected. There is weak evidence that residential wages increased in response to the boom. These results are important as drilling decisions are often negotiated locally by interest groups that might be less concerned with general equilibrium effects.     

Trading behaviour connectedness across commodity markets: Evidence from the hedgers’ sentiment perspective

This paper analyses the connectedness network for commercial traders’ sentiment across agriculture, energy, metals and livestock futures markets. The findings find that: (a) producer/merchant/processor/user (PMPU) in agricultural and energy markets are mainly engaged in cross-hedging in the futures market, and most of them would avoid risks in these markets by operating in the metal markets, which can be considered safe for PMPU traders, and that the cross-hedging strategies may play the role of PMPU sentiment spillover across futures markets; (b) as index traders, the swap dealers operate more in two markets, namely between the agricultural and metal markets, or between the agricultural and energy markets; (c) the influence of geopolitical risks in some countries can affect the stability of energy markets, which in turn can cause PMPU system-wide connectedness.     

Does global liquidity drive commodity prices?

This paper tackles the question of whether a cross-sectional perspective on monetary policy is capable of explaining movements in global commodity prices. In this vein, we contribute to the rich literature on global liquidity in two different ways: on the one hand, to achieve a global series in terms of common monetary policy shocks, we propose a distinction between common and idiosyncratic factors across economies, as proposed by Bai and Ng (2004). Our second innovation stems from the consideration of a Markov-switching vector error correction model when analyzing time-varying short-run dynamics. Having identified the long-run structure which includes a proportional relationship between commodity prices and global liquidity in the first step, our results indeed show that the impact of a global liquidity measure on different commodity prices is significant and varies over time. One regime approximately accounts for times where commodity prices significantly adjust to disequilibria, while the second regime is characterized by either a weak or no commodity price adjustment. The fact that global liquidity also reacts to disequilibria in a specific regime demonstrates the two-way causality between monetary policy and commodity prices.     

Optimal commodity taxation with duty-free shopping

International travellers are frequently offered the opportunity to purchase a certain quantity of goods duty-free. Individuals differ in their opportunities to benefit from duty-free shopping, and we focus on the implications of these differences for optimal commodity taxation within a version of the optimal tax model of Mirrlees (Review of Economic Studies, 38, 175–208, 1971). We show how duty-free alters the constraints on the use of commodity taxes to reduce the distortionary costs of income taxation or to reflect externalities. Beyond characterising optimal taxes in the duty-free regime, we discuss conditions under which allowing duty-free would increase or reduce social welfare.