Export Restrictions and Price Insulation During Commodity Price Booms

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

International to Domestic Price Transmission in Fourteen Developing Countries during the 2007–8 Food Crisis

“…Export restrictions by major exporters reduced the world market supply and put additional pressure on international prices. An analysis by Martin and Anderson (2012) finds that export restrictions alone could explain 45 per cent of the increase in the international rice price and up to 30 per cent of the observed rise in the world wheat prices, while Headey and Fan (2010) attribute almost the entire rice price spike and up to half of the wheat price shock to export restrictions. Martin and Anderson (2012) argue that this poses a collective action problem in which the intended outcome of individual export restrictions (i.e.…”

Volatile and Extreme Food Prices, Food Security, and Policy: An Overview

“…Much of this response has been only partly effective-or it even contributed to increasing volatility elsewhere [see Martin and Anderson (2012) for the case of trade policies]. This is partly based on a collective action failure to coordinate policies such that they re-enforce rather than neutralize each other.…”

Managing Food Price Volatility in a Large Open Country: The Case of Wheat in India

“…The recent food crisis (and prior crises) demonstrated that when one country institutes trade policies to insulate from the world market, the desire of other countries to use insulating policies is reinforced, and the overall effectiveness of such policies is attenuated (Martin and Anderson, 2012;Anderson et al, 2014). By definition this collective action problem cannot be solved by one country alone, but the problem may nevertheless matter for the design of an individual country's policies.…”