Publication: The Role of Inventory Adjustments in Quantifying Factors Causing Food Price Inflation
Loading...
Date
2011-08-01
ISSN
Published
2011-08-01
Editor(s)
Abstract
The food commodity price increases beginning in 2001 and culminating in the food crisis of 2007/08 reflected a combination of several factors, including economic growth, biofuel expansion, exchange rate fluctuations, and energy price inflation. To quantify these influences, the authors developed an empirical model that also included crop inventory adjustments. The study shows that, if inventory effects are not taken into account, the impacts of the various factors on food commodity price inflation would be overestimated. If the analysis ignores crop inventory adjustments, it indicates that prices of corn, soybean, rapeseed, rice, and wheat would have been, respectively, 42, 38, 52, and 45 percent lower than the corresponding observed prices in 2007. If inventories are properly taken into account, the contributions of the above mentioned factors to those commodity prices are 36, 26, 26, and 35 percent, respectively. Those four factors, taken together, explain 70 percent of the price increase for corn, 55 percent for soybean, 54 percent for wheat, and 47 percent for rice during the 2001-2007 period. Other factors, such as speculation, trade policy, and weather shocks, which are not included in the analysis, might be responsible for the remaining contribution to the food commodity price increases.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Hochman, Gal; Rajagopal, Deepak; Timilsina, Govinda; Zilberman, David. 2011. The Role of Inventory Adjustments in Quantifying Factors Causing Food Price Inflation. Paper is funded by the Knowledge for Change
Program (KCP),Policy Research working paper ; no. WPS 5744. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/3506 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication The Asymmetric Bank Distress Amplifier of Recessions(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-11)One defining feature of financial crises, evident in U.S. and international data, is asymmetric bank distress—concentrated losses on a subset of banks. This paper proposes a model in which shocks to borrowers’ productivity dispersion lead to asymmetric bank losses. The framework exhibits a “bank distress amplifier,” exacerbating economic downturns by causing costly bank failures and raising uncertainty about the solvency of banks, thereby pushing banks to deleverage. Quantitative analysis shows that the bank distress amplifier doubles investment decline and increases the spread by 2.5 times during the Great Recession compared to a standard financial accelerator model. The mechanism helps explain how a seemingly small shock can sometimes trigger a large crisis.Publication From Tailwinds to Headwinds(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-10)The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been transformative for emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). These economies now account for about 45 percent of global GDP, up from about 25 percent in 2000, a trend driven by robust collective growth in the three largest EMDEs—China, India, and Brazil (the EM3). Collectively, EMDEs have contributed about 60 percent of annual global growth since 2000, on average, double the share during the 1990s. Their ascendance was powered by swift global trade and financial integration, especially during the first decade of the century. Interdependence among these economies has also increased markedly. Today, nearly half of goods exports from EMDEs go to other EMDEs, compared to one-quarter in 2000. As cross-border linkages have strengthened, business cycles among EMDEs and between EMDEs and advanced economies have become more synchronized, and a distinct EMDE business cycle has emerged. Cross-border business cycle spillovers from the EM3 to other EMDEs are sizable, at about half of the magnitude of spillovers from the largest advanced economies (the United States, the euro area, and Japan). Yet EMDEs confront a host of headwinds at the turn of the second quarter of the century. Progress implementing structural reforms in many of these economies has stalled. Globally, protectionist measures and geopolitical fragmentation have risen sharply. High debt burdens, demographic shifts, and the rising costs of climate change weigh on economic prospects. A successful policy approach to accelerate growth and development should focus on boosting investment and productivity, navigating a difficult external environment, and enhancing macroeconomic stability.Publication Intergenerational Income Mobility around the World(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-09)This paper introduces a new global database with estimates of intergenerational income mobility for 87 countries, covering 84 percent of the world’s population. This marks a notable expansion of the cross-country evidence base on income mobility, particularly among low- and middle-income countries. The estimates indicate that the negative association between income mobility and inequality (known as the Great Gatsby Curve) continues to hold across this wider range of countries. The database also reveals a positive association between income mobility and national income per capita, suggesting that countries achieve higher levels of intergenerational mobility as they grow richer.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05)Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Responding to Higher and More Volatile World Food Prices(Washington, DC, 2012-05)Following the world food price spike in 2008 and again in 2011, there has been increased attention on better understanding the drivers of food prices, their impacts on the poor, and policy response options. This paper provides a simple model that closely simulates actual historical food price behavior around which the analysis of the drivers of food price levels, volatility, and the associated response options is derived. Future food prices are likely to remain higher than pre-2007 levels and recent price uncertainty is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Accelerated use of food crops for industrial purposes (biofuels) continues to offset the slowing population growth effect on food demand. World food stocks remain at relatively low levels where the likelihood of price spikes is higher. Production gains may be harder to achieve in the future than in the past, with more limited space for area expansion, declining yield growth, and increases in weather variability. Suggested responses to reduce average food price levels are to (i) raise food crop yields, and their resilience, as the single most important action needed for an enduring solution to global food security; (ii) improve the rural investment climate to induce a private sector supply response; (iii) facilitate land markets to expand planted food crop areas and strengthen property rights to improve the use of existing cropped areas; (iv) better use price risk management tools; and (v) increase the responsiveness of the food system to price increases through better integrating markets to ensure world price signals reach more producers to induce a supply response. To reduce world food price volatility, suggested responses are to: (1) develop weather-tolerant crop varieties to reduce food production shocks; (2) improve management of food-grain stock purchases and releases to reduce, rather than amplify, local and world food price volatility; (3) shift to market-based biofuels policies (make biofuels mandates more flexible); (4) open trade across all markets to diversify short-term production shocks dissipating the associated price effects; and (5) improve market transparency to reduce market uncertainty and the associated large price corrections following revisions to market information (production, stocks, and trade). Suggested measures to reduce the negative impact of price shocks on food security are: (a) reduce taxes and tariffs (in some cases) to lower domestic prices, (b) short-term food and cash transfers to preserve purchasing power, and (c) support for agricultural production to try to prevent a next season shortfall that could add to local price increases.Publication Preferential Liberalization and Its Economy-Wide Effects in Honduras(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-02)This paper quantifies the likely benefits of trade and investment liberalization in a small, poor, open economy, using the accession of Honduras to the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement as a case study. The results show that bilateral trade liberalization with the United States is likely to have almost no effect on welfare in Honduras, while the reciprocal removal of protection vis-a-vis the rest of Central America would lead to significantly larger gains. Potential gains from increased net foreign direct investment inflows overwhelm those expected from trade reform alone, particularly if the new foreign direct investment generates productivity spillovers. However, if it is to replace Honduran investment rather than complement domestic capital formation, growth performance is unlikely to improve and may even suffer. The paper's results identify several areas for policy attention by Honduran policy makers to make the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement more development-friendly. These include carefully considering the budgetary implications of trade reform, widening social safety nets to counter the trends toward increasing income inequality, and sequencing the reforms to ensure a close alignment of Honduras' comparative advantage on the regional and global markets.Publication World Food Prices and Human Development: Policy Simulations for Archetype Low-Income Countries(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-04)In recent years, world food prices have increased and fluctuated widely. This paper explores the impact of international food prices and domestic policies on Millennium Development Goal (MDG) and macro indicators for two archetype low-income countries, a net food exporter and a net food importer, using Maquette for MDG Simulations (MAMS), a Computable General Equilibrium model. The simulations, which cover the period 2011-2025, indicate that the size of positive (negative) effects on macro and MDG indicators of a food export (import) price increase depend on the initial gross domestic product share for food exports (imports), leaving countries that are heavily involved in international food trade more exposed to international shocks. Given relatively low elasticity estimates, the impact of changes in food prices on undernourishment are relatively marginal. Flexible responses (in terms of production shares, whether output is exported or sold at home, and whether domestic demanders buy imports or domestic output) enable countries to benefit from or be less hurt by price changes. The case for policy responses to higher import prices is stronger for the net food importer. An untargeted food subsidy, financed by taxes or spending cuts, reduces undernourishment at the cost of a slight deterioration for most other indicators. By contrast, aid-financed food subsidies neutralize the negative impact of higher import prices whereas financing via domestic borrowing is counterproductive, leading to a deterioration across all indicators. If administered at moderate costs, tax-financed targeted transfers more effectively reduce headcount poverty and inequality with macroeconomic repercussions similar to those of tax-financed subsidies.Publication Inflation Dynamics and Food Prices in an Agricultural Economy : The Case of Ethiopia(2009-06-01)Ethiopia has experienced a historically unprecedented increase in inflation, mainly driven by cereal price inflation, which is among the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using monthly data from the past decade, the authors estimate error correction models to identify the relative importance of several factors contributing to overall inflation and its three major components, cereal prices, food prices, and non-food prices. The main finding is that, in a longer perspective, over three to four years, the main factors that determine domestic food and non-food prices are the exchange rate and international food and goods prices. In the short run, agricultural supply shocks and inflation inertia strongly affect domestic inflation, causing large deviations from long-run price trends. Money supply growth does affect food price inflation in the short run, although the money stock itself does not seem to drive inflation. The results suggest the need for a multi-pronged approach to fight inflation. Forecast scenarios suggest monetary and exchange rate policies need to take into account cereal production, which is among the key determinants of inflation, assuming a decline in global commodity prices. Implementation of successful policies will be contingent on the availability of foreign exchange and the performance of agriculture.Publication How Vulnerable Are Arab Countries to Global Food Price Shocks?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-03)This paper presents new estimates of pass-through coefficients from international to domestic food prices by country in the Middle East and North Africa. The estimates indicate that, despite the use of food price subsidies and other government interventions, a rise in global food prices is transmitted to a significant degree into domestic food prices in many countries in the Middle East and North Africa, although cross-country variation is significant. In nearly all countries, domestic food prices are highly downwardly rigid. The finding of asymmetric price transmission suggests that not only international food price levels matter, but also food price volatility. High food pass-through tends to increase inflation pressures, where food consumption shares are high. Domestic factors, often linked to storage, logistics, and procurement, have also played a major role in explaining high food inflation in the majority of countries in the region.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Design Thinking for Social Innovation(2010-07)Designers have traditionally focused on enchancing the look and functionality of products.Publication Breaking the Conflict Trap : Civil War and Development Policy(Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2003)Most wars are now civil wars. Even though international wars attract enormous global attention, they have become infrequent and brief. Civil wars usually attract less attention, but they have become increasingly common and typically go on for years. This report argues that civil war is now an important issue for development. War retards development, but conversely, development retards war. This double causation gives rise to virtuous and vicious circles. Where development succeeds, countries become progressively safer from violent conflict, making subsequent development easier. Where development fails, countries are at high risk of becoming caught in a conflict trap in which war wrecks the economy and increases the risk of further war. The global incidence of civil war is high because the international community has done little to avert it. Inertia is rooted in two beliefs: that we can safely 'let them fight it out among themselves' and that 'nothing can be done' because civil war is driven by ancestral ethnic and religious hatreds. The purpose of this report is to challenge these beliefs.Publication Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08)The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.Publication Governance Matters IV : Governance Indicators for 1996-2004(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06)The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.Publication Governance Matters VIII : Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008(2009-06-01)This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.