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For market players and policy officials, commodity price forecasts are crucial problems that are challenging to address due to the complexity of price time series. Given its strategic importance, corn crops are hardly an exception. The current paper evaluates the forecasting issue for China’s weekly wholesale price index for yellow corn from January 1, 2010 to January 10, 2020. We develop a Gaussian process regression model using cross validation and Bayesian optimizations over various kernels and basis functions that could effectively handle this sophisticated commodity price forecast problem. The model provides precise out-of-sample forecasts from January 4, 2019 to January 10, 2020, with a relative root mean square error, root mean square error, and mean absolute error of 1.245%, 1.605, and 0.936, respectively. The models developed here might be used by market players for market evaluations and decision-making as well as by policymakers for policy creation and execution.

The large inflow of investment capital to commodity futures markets in the past decade has generated a heated debate about whether financialization distorts commodity prices. Rather than focusing on the opposing views concerning whether investment flows caused a price bubble, we critically review academic studies through the perspective of how financial investors affect risk sharing and information discovery in commodity markets. We argue that financialization has substantially changed commodity markets through these mechanisms.

US retail food price increases in recent years may seem large in nominal terms, but after adjusting for inflation have been quite modest even after the change in US biofuel policies in 2006. In contrast, increases in the real prices of corn, soybeans, wheat and rice received by US farmers have been more substantial and can be linked in part to increases in the real price of oil. That link, however, appears largely driven by common macroeconomic determinants of the prices of oil and of agricultural commodities rather than the pass-through from higher oil prices. We show that there is no evidence that corn ethanol mandates have created a tight link between oil and agricultural markets. Moreover, increases in agricultural commodity prices have contributed little to US retail food price increases, because of the small cost share of agricultural products in food prices. In short, there is no evidence that oil price shocks have been associated with more than a negligible increase in US retail food prices in recent years. Nor is there evidence for the prevailing wisdom that oil-price driven increases in the cost of food processing, packaging, transportation and distribution have been responsible for higher retail food prices. Similar results hold for other industrialized countries. There is reason, however, to expect food commodity prices to be more tightly linked to retail food prices in developing countries.

The article expects to solve the traditional econometric statistical model, shallow machine learning algorithm, and many limitations in learning the nonlinear relationship of related indicators affecting commodity futures price trend. This article proposes a neural network commodity futures price prediction model by the mixture of convolutional neural networks (CNN) and gated recurrent unit (GRU). Firstly, the dimension reduction algorithm of multidimensional data by principal component analysis (PCA) is used. Through linear transformation, the original variables with correlation are transformed into a set of new linear irrelevant variables, and the high-dimensional time series data of commodity futures are reduced. Secondly, the variable features are extracted from the CNN network module in the CNN-GRU model, and the GRU network module learns the periodicity and trend of the original data. Finally, the full connection layer outputs the forecast results of commodity futures price.

Agricultural price prediction is a hot research topic in the field of agriculture, and accurate prediction of agricultural prices is crucial to realize the sustainable and healthy development of agriculture. It explores traditional forecasting methods, intelligent forecasting methods, and combination model forecasting methods, and discusses the challenges faced in the current research landscape of agricultural commodity price prediction. The results of the study show that: (1) The use of combined models for agricultural product price forecasting is a future development trend, and exploring the combination principle of the models is a key to realize accurate forecasting; (2) the integration of the combination of structured data and unstructured variable data into the models for price forecasting is a future development trend; and (3) in the prediction of agricultural product prices, both the accuracy of the values and the precision of the trends should be ensured. This paper reviews and analyzes the methods of agricultural product price prediction and expects to provide some help for the development of research in this field.

Oil has historically been the most significant primary energy source for our daily lives and business activities. However, recent skyrocketing oil prices have been one of the greatest concerns among policymakers, business executives, and the general public due to their impacts on daily necessities, including food, clothing, and automobile transportation. As a result, fast-rising inflation on the global scale is attributed to mounting oil prices. Even though many countries have made a conscious effort to tame oil prices and the subsequent inflation, their efforts are often in vain due to some uncontrollable situations. These situations include the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, where Russia began weaponizing its oil resources and limiting oil supplies to its neighboring European countries. Faced with the current energy crisis, a growing number of policymakers and business executives have attempted to develop energy-induced risk mitigation strategies. With this in mind, the primary purpose of this paper is to investigate what may have caused oil price hikes and to determine how significantly oil prices influence commodity prices. This paper then proposes ways to mitigate energy-induced supply chain risks by analyzing four decades of secondary data obtained from multiple sources.

Sub-Saharan economies often rely heavily on a narrow range of commodities, making them particularly vulnerable to price fluctuations in global markets. This volatility predisposes these countries to economic instability, threatening short-term growth and long-term development goals. As a result, this study examines the sustainability implications of commodity price volatility and commodity dependence for 31 Sub-Saharan African countries from 2000 to 2023. Eleven agricultural commodity-dependent countries, six energy commodity-dependent countries, and fourteen mineral and metal ore-dependent countries were chosen. This study uses balanced annual panel data from World Development Indicators, World Bank Commodity Price Data, and Federal Reserve Bank Data. The data were analyzed using the VECM, and this study’s findings were threefold and unanimous for all three categories of commodities (agricultural, energy and mineral, and metal ore). First, commodity dependence is positively related to economic growth, suggesting that higher commodity prices benefit the economy in the long run. Second, commodity price volatility is negatively related to economic growth, indicating adverse impacts on economic stability in the long run. Third, commodity dependence is positively related to commodity price volatility in the long run. By analyzing the interconnectedness of these factors, this study underscores the need for diversified economic policies and sustainable practices to reduce vulnerability and promote sustainable development in the region. The findings highlight the critical role of strategic resource management and policy interventions in achieving economic stability and ensuring the well-being of future generations.

Purpose Firms can choose from an array of approaches for reducing the detrimental financial effects caused by unfavorable fluctuations in commodity prices. The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance for effectively estimating the financial effects of mitigating commodity price risk volatility (CPV) in supply chain management decisions. Design/methodology/approach This paper adopts two prominent and complementary methodologies, namely, total cost of ownership (TCO and real options valuation (ROV), to illustrate how commodity price risk mitigation strategies can be analyzed with respect to their effect on costs and performance. The paper provides insights through a case study to demonstrate the application of these methods together and establish the benefits and challenges associated with their implementation. Findings The paper illustrates advantages and disadvantages of TCO and ROV and how these approaches can be adopted together to contribute to effective purchasing decisions. Supply chain flexibility is a key capability but requires investments. Holistically measuring the financial effects of flexibility investments is imperative for gaining executive management support in mitigating commodity price volatility. Research limitations/implications This study can provide supply chain professionals with useful guidance for measuring the costs and benefits related to developing strategies for mitigating commodity price volatility. TCO provides a focus on the costs associated with the commodity purchasing process, and ROV enables the aggregation of all the costs and benefits associated with the use of the strategy and synthesizes them into the net value estimate. Originality/value The paper provides a comparison of different but complementary approaches, specifically TCO and ROV, for analyzing the effectiveness of CPV risk mitigation decisions. In addition, these two methods allow supply chain professionals to evaluate and control the financial effects of CPV risk, particularly the impact of mitigation on firm’s cash flows.

We present a new term-structure model for commodity futures prices based on Trolle and Schwartz (2009), which we extend by incorporating seasonal stochastic volatility represented with two different sinusoidal expressions. We obtain a quasi-analytical representation of the characteristic function of the futures log-prices and closed-form expressions for standard European options’ prices using the fast Fourier transform algorithm. We price plain vanilla options on the Henry Hub natural gas futures contracts, using our model and extant models. We obtain higher accuracy levels with our model than with the extant models.

This research sheds light on the causal link between commodity price indexes, i.e., the Agricultural Raw Materials Price Index, Industry Input Price Index, Metal Price Index, and Energy Price Index, in the global market, using wavelet coherence, Toda-Yamamoto causality, and gradual shift causality tests over the period 1992M1 to 2019M12. Findings from the wavelet power spectrum and partial wavelet coherence reveal that: (1) there was significant volatility in the Agricultural Raw Materials Price Index, Industry Input Price Index, Metal Price Index, and Energy Price Index between 2004 and 2014 at different frequencies; and (2) commodity price indexes significantly caused the energy price index at different time periods and frequencies. It is noteworthy that the outcomes of the Toda-Yamamoto causality and gradual-shift causality tests are in line with the results of wavelet coherence.