Publication: Commodity Price Cycles: Commonalities, Heterogeneities, and Drivers
Date
2023-04-13
ISSN
Published
2023-04-13
Author(s)
Kabundi, Alain
Zahid, Hamza
Abstract
This paper studies commodity price
cycles and their underlying drivers using a dynamic factor
model. The study employs a sample of 39 monthly commodity
prices over 1970:01 to 2019:12. The analysis identifies
global and group–specific cycles in commodity markets and
includes them in a structural vector autoregressive model
together with measures of global economic activity and
global inflation, to disentangle their response to global
demand, global supply, and commodity market-specific shocks.
The findings reveal the following main results. (i) There
exists a global cycle in commodity markets that accounts for
an increasing fraction of co-movement in commodity prices
over the past two decades, particularly for energy, metals,
and precious metals. (ii) The results are heterogeneous
across groups of commodities, with group-specific commodity
cycles existing for grains and precious metals over the full
sample period, 1970–2019. Metal and energy prices exhibit
within-group synchronization over 1970–99; however, in
recent years, their movements have become increasingly
aligned with the global business cycle. (iii) Since 2000,
the global commodity cycle is largely driven by global
supply shocks, such as rapid productivity growth in emerging
markets and developing economies, which increase demand for
commodities. (iv) The large price spikes observed during the
two most prominent commodity market boom-bust episodes of
the past half-century (1972–74 and 2006–08) are driven
additionally by shocks that are orthogonal to global
economic activity such as shifts in speculative demand for commodities.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Kabundi, Alain; Zahid, Hamza. 2023. Commodity Price Cycles: Commonalities, Heterogeneities, and Drivers. Policy Research Working Papers; 10401. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/39687 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”