Can Global Economic Policy Uncertainty Drive the Interdependence of Agricultural Commodity Prices? Evidence from Partial Wavelet Coherence Analysis

Abstract

This paper employed wavelet coherence and partial wavelet coherence to investigate the time-frequency effect of global economic policy uncertainty on the comovement of five agricultural commodities such as maize, oat, rice, soybean, and wheat using monthly data from January 1997 to December 2019. In general, we observed heterogeneity in comovement structures of the agricultural commodities market at different time-frequency scales which are profound at high frequencies from the bivariate wavelet coherence. The partial wavelet coherence analysis shows that global economic policy uncertainty is a driver of agricultural commodity market connectedness. This implies that extreme changes in economic policy uncertainty have the tendency to influence commodity price comovement. This poses risk to the stability of the agricultural commodities market, which requires the policymaker's intervention to protect against the spillover risk contagion effect in uncertain times.