New Econometric Techniques for Textile Market Research

Abstract

The work presented here is part of a detailed study on the nature and origin of fluctuations in international wool prices. Special attention is drawn to the usefulness of recent developments in statistical time-series analysis for market studies of this type. These make it possible to show that the “textile cycle” evident in wool (and other textile) prices for more than a century is fundamentally a strongly amplified version of a similar broadband fluctuation in general business conditions in the major manufacturing countries. However, it is seen that more recently this simple pattern has been disrupted somewhat, probably by the impact of a sequence of capacity expansions in the synthetic fiber industry