Long-term trends in the Real real prices of primary commodities: Inflation bias and the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis

In his recent article on measuring the long-term trends in the real prices of primary commodities, Cuddington (2010) extends in several important respects our earlier efforts (Svedberg and Tilton, 2006) to correct real commodity price trends for biases in the Consumer Price Index and other deflators. First, he argues for a log-linear relationship between prices and time. Second, he proposes a simple and quick method for obtaining corrected price trends from the published but uncorrected estimates. Finally, he illustrates, for the case of copper and presumably for many other commodities as well, the difficulties of obtaining real price trends significantly different from zero when the log values of the price data contain a unit root, requiring the use of difference stationary models.We welcome these insights, which should improve and make easier efforts to estimate correctly real commodity price trends over the long run. We would stress, however, that it is still important to correct for the biases in inflation indices, notwithstanding the failure of difference stationary models to obtain long-run real price trends (both corrected and uncorrected) significantly different from zero.     

旅游商品的模糊综合评价

旅游商品是旅游市场经济效益产出中非常重要的一个方面。面对市场上旅游商品良莠不齐和缺少旅游商品相关评价标准的状况,采用模糊数学方法对旅游商品进行综合评价。在提出四层评价体系实施方案的同时,将该评价方法应用于旅游实践,从而为旅游商品开发者、生产者、经销者或旅游景区的旅游商品开发管理提供参考。