Dependence structure between crude oil, soybeans, and palm oil in ASEAN region: Energy and food security context

Abstract

The increase in energy and food prices remains a challenge for the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). Understanding the dependence between energy prices and food prices is imperative for the energy and food security for the people of the ASEAN countries. The C-vine copula model is a flexible tool to analyze the relationship between variables, in which the multivariate dependence modeling. It offers us to define the relationship structure between variables or we call pair-copula construction, according to the purpose of study. This study is interesting to examine an influence of crude oil price on palm oil price and soybeans price. The results can conclude that the change of crude oil price has influence on the prices of palm oil and soybeans. Moreover, the findings show that there exists the dependence between palm oil price and soybeans price, and crude oil price is one factor that has influence on relation of their prices. However, the dependence structure of the static copula for Crude oil-Palm oil (C,P), Crude oil-Soybeans (C,S), Palm oil-Soybeans (P,S), there exists a weak positive dependence in each pair-copula. This indicates that the price of each commodity is slightly related to the price of every other. In the case of soybeans, the ASEAN members should cooperate and incorporate their efforts to increase the capacity and performance in production to reduce relying on soybeans being imported from outside the region. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.