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Abstract

We investigate to which extent the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS), set up by the G20 in 2011, can help to reduce food price volatility. Linking uncertainty about fundamentals and volatility in a theoretical model, we show that the uncertainty provides an upper limit for the volatility. In our qualitative analysis we argue that AMIS may help to foster desired price changes and to prevent undesired price changes but at the same time its success in doing so has been limited until now because countries remain reluctant to share their data and the private sector remains largely excluded. Our quantitative analysis shows that the estimations of fundamentals from different sources deviate a lot, especially for stocks. Over time, different estimations seem to comove rather than to converge (for the marketing year 2012/13). With the help of a panel regression we find correlations between food price volatility and oil price volatility, stock-to-use ratios, productions shocks, and uncertainty of the fundamentals.

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