Les hausses récentes des cours des matières premières traduisent-elles l'entrée dans un régime de prix plus élevés ?

In this paper, we seek to determine whether the recent increase in commodity prices, and especially in prices of food products, reflects a regime switch towards higher price levels. Accordingly, we use a Kalman filter and a Markov-switching model in order to analyze the evolution of terms-of-trade for commodities and food products over the period 1900-2010. Our results support the hypothesis that the commodity terms-of-trade have moved, since 2006 (2008 for food products), to a new regime characterized by an average price level about 50% higher than the one that prevailed over the period 1986-2005 (1986-2007 for food products).