The recent upsurge in the food prices experienced by the Indian economy since the latter half of 2000s has made it imperative for the policymakers to identify the crucial factors, which affect food prices within the economy. Against this backdrop, the present article determines the various key factors impacting the prices of food grains, specifically elucidating the role of intermediaries in this regard. By applying the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration and quantifying the role of intermediaries by computing the price wedge between wholesale and retail prices of food grains, the study establishes the existence of both short-run and long-run relationships between price wedge and food grain inflation.
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