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Commodity markets are integral to the global economy. Understanding what drives developments of these markets is critical to the design of policy frameworks that facilitate the economic objectives of sustainable growth, inflation stability, poverty reduction, food security, and the mitigation of climate change. This study is the first comprehensive analysis examining market and policy developments for all commodity groups, including energy, metals, and agriculture, over the past century. It finds that, while the quantity of commodities consumed has risen enormously, driven by population and income growth, the relative importance of commodities has shifted over time, as technological innovation created new uses for some materials and facilitated substitution among commodities. The study also shows that commodity markets are heterogeneous in terms of their drivers, price behavior, and macroeconomic impact on emerging markets and developing economies, and that the relationship between economic growth and commodity demand varies widely across countries, depending on their stage of economic development. Policy frameworks that enable countercyclical macroeconomic responses have become increasingly common—and beneficial. Other policy tools have had mixed outcomes.

The prices of 27 internationally traded commodities are decomposed into transitory and permanent shocks by applying an ideal band-pass filter to monthly data from 1970–2020. The two types of shocks contributed roughly equally to price variations, but with wide heterogeneity. Permanent shocks ac-counted for two-thirds of the variability in agricultural prices but less than 30 percent in energy prices. The transitory shock component revealed three medium-term cycles. The first (from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s) and third (from the early 2000s to 2020 onward) exhibit similar duration and involve almost all commodities, while the second (spanning the 1990s) is mostly applicable to metals, with the notable absence of energy. The permanent shock components differ across commodities, with an up-ward trend for most industrial commodities and downward trend for agriculture. Moreover, the permanent component of commodity prices where investment is irreversible, including energy, metals, and tree crops, exhibits a high degree of nonlinearities, which also coincide with the two post–World War II supercycles. By contrast, the permanent component of annual agricultural prices is linear, reflecting greater flexibility in investment allocation and input use of these commodities. Prices of commodities subjected to widespread policy interventions, such as international commodity agreements, exhibit persistent deviations from linear trends.

The outbreak of COVID-19 and the wide-ranging measures needed to slow its advance triggered an unprecedented collapse in oil demand, a surge in oil inventories, and a record one-month decline in oil prices in March 2020. This paper examines the likely implications of the 2020 oil price plunge for emerging market and developing economies. It presents four main results. First, the record plunge in oil prices was predominantly driven by demand factors as wide-ranging measures to stem the pandemic precipitated an unprecedented collapse in oil demand, but the surge in oil inventories also exerted downward pressure on oil prices. Second, this latest oil price decline was preceded by six previous plunges over the past half-century, during which energy exporters and importers suffered similar initial output losses (about 0.5 percent) that were unwound within three years. Third, the current episode of low oil prices holds limited promise to boost the global economy amid widespread restrictions and narrow room for fiscal support in energy-exporting emerging market and developing economies. Fourth, many emerging market and developing economies entered the current public health crisis with precarious fiscal positions; current low oil prices are thus an opportunity to review energy-pricing policies, including remaining energy subsidies, to mobilize domestic resources.

This paper presents estimates of time-varying income elasticities of demand for energy and metal commodities. The analysis finds that the elasticities are close to unity, evaluated at world median per capita income levels. Furthermore, the estimates confirm that as income rises, demand growth for industrial commodities slows and eventually plateaus. Indeed, estimates for aggregate metals and energy differ by an order of magnitude throughout the income spectrum: from a low of 0.2 for advanced economies to nearly 2 for low-income countries. The analysis, which accounts for substitutability by estimating group aggregates as well as individual commodities with cross-price effects, is based on a panel autoregressive distributed lag model covering 1965-2018, for up to 63 countries.