About this Workshop

Description
Increases in food price inflation and volatility in recent years have renewed focus on the determinants and impacts of food price changes, as well as on the importance of reliable food price forecasts. The USDA Food Price Outlook (FPO) tracks and forecasts food price changes and FPO forecasts inform USDA agencies, industry, academia, and the public and rank second in web traffic among ERS data products. Even after recent refinements, the current FPO approach to forecasting food prices could be further improved by incorporating market conditions such as energy costs, wages, labor availability, transportation congestion, and market concentration, which have recently been cited as drivers of record-breaking inflation rates. Macroeconomic conditions that potentially affect retail demand, including the money supply, exchange rates, and core inflation, have only been examined in a pre-pandemic context, and it is unclear whether these same mechanisms can explain current inflationary trends. To address these shortcomings and identify new research areas, the workshop will gather top experts from government, academia, and industry to identify stakeholders’ needs, underutilized information, and the best methods for evaluating and forecasting food prices.

Target Audience
Empirical researchers from government, academia, and industry in evaluating and forecasting food prices.

Expected Outcomes
The workshop’s main goals are to present and discuss the research that has been developed under the Strategic Priority Grant on the topic of food prices and forecasting that was sponsored by the USDA-ERS, foster the establishment of research partnerships between attendees, and to gather papers for the publication of a journal special issue.

Location
Balconies J and K (4th floor)

Event Details

Wednesday, July 31, 2024, 8:00AM - 6:00PM

Thursday, August 1, 2024, 8:00AM - 12:30PM

Registration

You can register for the workshop here.