The Effects of Foreign Price Uncertainty on Australian Production and Trade*

Abstract

This article provides an empirical analysis of the impact of uncertain international prices on Australia's production sector and international trade. We model the movement of traded goods prices via a generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model and embed this within an expected utility maximising model of the production sector. The empirical results are consistent with expected utility maximisation and the hypothesis of risk neutrality is soundly rejected. Estimates of the effects of changes in expected prices and volatility of traded goods prices upon production decisions and the return to capital are discussed. The conclusion is that price uncertainty matters for the Australian production sector.