This paper presents a comprehensive database of country-specific commodity price indices for 182 economies covering the period 1962-2018. For each country, the change in the international price of up to 45 individual commodities is weighted using commodity-level trade data. The database includes...

This paper relates the inflationary impact of commodity price shocks across countries to a broad range of structural characteristics and policy frameworks over the period 2001-2010, using several approaches. The analysis suggests that economies with higher food shares in CPI baskets, fuel...

There is a common perception that the prices of unrelated commodities move together. This paper re-examines this notion, using a measure of comovement of economic time series called concordance. Concordance measures the proportion of time that the prices of two commodities are concurrently in...

Expansionary monetary policies in key industrial countries and sharply depreciating U.S. dollar exchange rate sent commodities prices soaring at unprecedented rates during 2003-2007. Food prices rose to alarming levels threatening malnutrition and food riots. In contrast, consumer price indices,...

Using the longest dataset publicly available (The Economist''s index of industrial commodity prices), we analyze the behavior of real commodity prices over the period 1862-99, and have two main findings. First, while there has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of 1.3 percent per...

The paper uses an event study methodology to investigate which and how macroeconomic announcements affect commodity prices. Results show that gold is unique among commodities, with prices reacting to specific scheduled announcements in the United States and the Euro area (such as indicators of...

We examine the effects that international commodity price shocks have on external debt using panel data for a world sample of 93 countries spanning the period 1970-2007. Our main finding is that positive commodity price shocks lead to a significant reduction in the level of external debt in...

We examine the effect that revenue windfalls from international commodity price shocks have on sovereign bond spreads using panel data for 30 emerging market economies during the period 1997-2007. Our main finding is that positive commodity price shocks lead to a significant reduction in the...