The Prebisch-Singer Hypothesis: Four Centuries of Evidence

David I. Harvey; Neil Kellard; Jakob B. Madsen; Mark E. Wohar

doi:10.1162/rest.2010.12184

The Prebisch-Singer Hypothesis: Four Centuries of Evidence

David I. Harvey¹; Neil Kellard²; Jakob B. Madsen^3,4,5; Mark E. Wohar⁶

¹ University of Nottingham · ² University of Essex · ³ Copenhagen Business School · ⁴ Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute · ⁵ Monash University · ⁶ University of Nebraska at Omaha

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2010 open access

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.

DOI: 10.1162/rest.2010.12184
Volume: 92 (2)
Pages: 367-377
Language: en
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Sources: crossref openalex