Spillovers between Commodity Prices and Biofuel Energy Prices

This study addressed the problem of causal price relationships between biofuels and an enhanced group of non-energy agricultural commodities, elaborating elegant econometric techniques for capturing possible asymmetric causal effects. The empirics explored the issue of spillovers between biofuels prices and commodity prices. It first investigated the long-run equilibrium and it assumed that an adjustment process toward the equilibrium was there. The adjustment process, however, could be non-linear, implying that it could identify critical thresholds that determine regions in the sample that once exceeded, while price inter linkages may vary. Hence, for the same commodity market, different policy measures could be appropriate in different regions. The empirical results indicated that there was a number of commodity prices that have strong causal (asymmetric) relationship with biofuel prices, compared to others that are weakly related. In the long run, an increase in the research and development of new production technology could further weaken price linkages to commodities and ameliorate the biofuels market conditions.