Price Linkages of Russian Regional Markets

Exploiting time series of the cost of a staples basket across 75 Russian regions over 1994-2000, price linkages of the regions are analyzed with the use of Granger causality as a tool. Price linkages of Russian regions are found extensive: on average, an individual regional market is linked through prices with 62% of others. Neither isolated clusters of regions nor autarkic regions are revealed; each region is linked with all others either directly or indirectly, through a chain of no more than two intermediate regions. Spatial autocorrelation is found to be widespread, taking place in two thirds of regions.