Publicaties

This doctoral thesis discerns the complicated dynamic interrelationships between financial asset markets, energy markets and traditional agricultural commodity markets. Recently, various factors have dramatically changed the economic relationships between these important markets which contributed to greater price volatility and complex price transmissions across these markets. Via the use of cointegration methodologies on stock and futures ...

Farmers use different information to predict future returns upon which they base current decisions. In designing information systems, knowledge about the information set used by farmers is relevant to have insight into the necessary information that should be made available for farmers. Using quasirational forecasting regression analysis to represent producer price expectation formation, the usefulness of disseminating real time information ...

The correct understanding of commodity price dynamics can bring relevant improvements in terms of policy formulation both for developing and developed countries. Agricultural, metal and energy commodity prices might depend on each other: although we expect few important effects among the total number of possible ones, some price effects among different commodities might still be substantial. Moreover, the increasing integration of the world ...

The correct understanding of commodity price dynamics can bring relevant improvements in terms of policy formulation both for developing and developed countries. Agricultural, metal and energy commodity prices might depend on each other: although we expect few important effects among the total number of possible ones, some price effects among different commodities might still be substantial. Moreover, the increasing integration of the world ...

The repercussions of reforming an agricultural market are mainly observed at the most vulnerable segment of the value chain, namely, the producers. In the current commodity market created with trade through the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX), coffee is less traceable to its producers. Only cooperatives that sell certified coffee through the unions they belong to, are allowed to bypass the more commodified ECX market. This study aims to ...

One of the key assumptions in the original model of proto-industries, formulated by Mendels, Kriedte, Medick and Schlumbohm, is that the size and composition of families were determined by the proto-industrial work process in which those families were involved. The family was considered to be the basic unit of production, and the larger this unit, i.e. the more children a family had, the better. Among other reasons, with more children, a certain ...

Studies that examine the impact of food prices on conflict usually assume that (all) changes in international food prices are exogenous shocks for individual countries or local areas. By isolating strictly exogenous shifts in global food commodity prices, we show that this assumption could seriously distort estimations of the impact on conflict in African regions. Specifically, we show that increases in food prices that are caused by harvest ...

The involvement of rural populations in market activities in the past is still debated. Were people lured into the market by the prospect of a better lifestyle, or pushed into the market for lack of any alternative means of coping? This book investigates the involvement of Flanders’ rural population in commodity markets in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Flanders has been one of the most urbanised regions in Europe since the Late Middle ...