After the declaration of the coronavirus pandemic by government authorities in March 2020 and the adoption of various measures around the world to limit the effects of COVID-19, the limitation of agroeconomic processing has affected important operations such as the inability to prepare the olive trees for the next harvest.
This lack of processes has meant that the consumer perceived an increase in prices due to the scarcity of the product and the growing demand for olive oil throughout the world.
Add to this the scenarios of dramatic climate changes throughout the Mediterranean basin, with a severe drought which impacted olive growing for two consecutive years, especially in Spain.
Research from the University of Madrid, through the use of advanced statistical and econometric techniques, seeks to carry out a specific analysis and understand the persistence of data and the trend of global olive oil prices. Artificial intelligence techniques such as neural network models are also used to predict long-term price behavior.
Using the ARFIMA model, the results indicate non-mean reversion behavior (ed. impossibility of returning to the origin), suggesting that the shock should be permanent, causing a change in trend.
This result is in line with that obtained using machine learning techniques, where the forecast suggests a price increase of approximately +11.36% in the next 12 months.
