Link Between Volatility of Commodity Prices and Commodity Dependence on Selected Sub-Saharan Countries

This study used data from global commodity prices from the World Bank's commodity price data site since the error term (endogenous) is connected with each country's commodity export price index. The pricing information covered agricultural products, world oil, minerals, and metal ores. One benefit of adopting international commodity prices, according to Deaton and Miller (1995), is that they are frequently unaffected by national activities.

The utilization of studies on global commodity prices is an example (Tahar et al., 2021). The commodity dependency index of country i at time i was computed as the as the ratio of export value of the dependent commodity to the total export value of the country. The commodity price volatility is estimated using standard deviation from monthly commodity price index to incorporate monthly price variation (Aghion et al., 2009).

This approach addresses challenges of within the year volatility inherent in the annual data. In footstep of Arezki et al. (2014) and Mondal & Khanam (2018), standard deviation is used in this study as a proxy of commodity price volatility. The standard deviation is used because of its simplicity and it is not conditioned on the unit of measurement.