Macroeconomics Food Inflation Cools Off Slightly December data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics show food prices rose year-on-year by 17.4 percent as compared to December 2018. Pork prices as noted in last week’s report were up for the month by 97 percent on an annualized basis. Nonetheless, December saw the first retreat in food prices since February. Apart from pork, edible oil prices increased in December by 4.8 percent over the previous year, while prices for fresh vegetables and eggs jumped by 10.8 percent and 6.2 percent, respectively. The only reprieve involved fresh fruit, which fell by 8 percent compared with December 2018. China’s food inflation has been the main driver of the country&rsq...
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.