Examining The Price Volatility On Agricultural Markets – Challenges And Implications Of The Current Economic Outline

Commodity prices have always been subject to a cyclical pattern of boom and recession phases around stable or decreasing trends on the long term. They are recognized in the economic analysis as experiencing a high degree of volatility and that their volatility also entails price volatility of manufactured goods. Accordingly, this aspect represented in the past and continues to be, even in a more pronounced degree, a reason for concern among all economic actors, governments, traders, producers and consumers. In order for the market participants to perceive and better manage volatility implications, it appears imperative to present a complex image of the factors that generate this instability. The current context, marked by numerous turbulences and by certain mutations in the behavior of economic actors on commodity and financial markets, confers new directions of analysis for the determinants of price fluctuations. The purpose of this paper is to highlight a number of new challenges arising in the analysis of agricultural commodity price volatility, with particular reference to the phenomenon of “financialization” of commodity markets and the intensification of the agricultural commodity and energy prices co-movements.