This is a companion to the Global Economic Prospects 2010. Most commodity prices reached historical highs in mid-2008, giving rise to the longest and broadest commodity boom of the post-WWII period. Apart from strong and sustained economic growth, the boom was fueled by numerous factors...

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 paper updates the analysis of the fiscal policy response over the recent commodity cycle, contributes to the analysis of key drivers of fiscal policy procyclicality, and provides a stock-tacking of current fiscal vulnerabilities. Countercyclical fiscal policy during good times has been a key...

Though well-established in the commercial sector, the use of market-based price risk management is not widespread in the public sector, particularly by sovereigns. Recent volatility in energy and food prices, however, has awakened the interest of some governments to learn more about how they can...

This paper assesses the international comovement of gross capital inflows and outflows using a two-level factor model. Among advanced and emerging countries, capital flows exhibit strong commonality: common (global and country group-specific) factors account, on average, for close to half of...

The regional books that provided detailed estimates of distortion in developing economies are all country focused. While they include commodity details for their particular country, they are not able to provide an overview for developing countries or high-income countries as a group, or for the...

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...

World commodity markets-and particularly the markets for agricultural commodities-remain highly distorted despite the wave of liberalization that has swept world trade since the 1980s. Some markets for commodities are characterized by imperfect competition. Where monopolies or oligopolies in...

Income growth in emerging economies has often been cited as a key driver of the past decade's com-modity price boom-the longest and broadest boom since World War II. This paper shows that income has a negative and highly significant effect on real food commodity prices, a finding that is...

Commodity-exporting developing economies are often characterized as having needlessly procyclical fiscal policy: spending when commodity prices are high and cutting back when prices fall. The standard policy advice is instead to save during price windfalls and maintain spending during price...