The Prebisch-Singer Hypothesis: Four Centuries of Evidence

Abstract

We employ a unique data set and new time-series techniques to reexamine the existence of trends in relative primary commodity prices. The data set comprises 25 commodities and provides a new historical perspective, spanning the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. New tests for the trend function, robust to the order of integration of the series, are applied to the data. Results show that eleven price series present a significant and downward trend over all or some fraction of the sample period. In the very long run, a secular, deteriorating trend is a relevant phenomenon for a significant proportion of primary commodities.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 350 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.