The effects of oil price and the exchange rate shocks on price of agricultural Commodities in Iran

Oil prices may be having a direct and indirect effect through the exchange rate on the price of agricultural commodities. In this paper, the impact of world oil prices and exchange rate shocks on prices of specific agricultural commodities including wheat, corn, soybeans and sunflowers in Iran is discussed. For this purpose, Vector Autoregressive Model with monthly data over the period 2010-1994, is used. After estimating the model, we can calculate the impulse response functions and variance analysis, and then, Response of prices of selected agricultural commodities to oil price and exchange rate shocks, and the contribution of each of these shocks to the forecast error variance of the variables examined. According to these results, Corn and soybean prices responses to oil price and exchange rate shocks is negative. Also, the effect of oil price shocks and exchange rate on wheat and sun flower price shows that Wheat and sunflower have a positive to the shock of the oil price and exchange rate. Also the results of the analysis shows that the relative importance of oil price shocks for three products including soybean, corn and sunflower is greater than exchange rate. But for wheat it is different and Exchange rate is almost more explanatory than oil price.