The COVID-19-triggered collapse in oil prices in March and April 2020 was the seventh, and by far the most severe, in a series of such collapses since 1970. This paper, first, compares this most recent collapse and its drivers with previous ones in an event study. It finds that it was associated...

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...

Rapid growth among the major emerging markets over the past 20 years has boosted global demand for commodities. The seven largest emerging markets accounted for almost all the increase in global consumption of metals, and two-thirds of the increase in energy consumption over this period. As...

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...