Estrenamos una nueva sección en español: series de precios históricos para una multitud de mercancías (commodities) incluyendo productos agrícolas, insumos industriales, metales, petróleo, gas natural, etc. La fuente es el Fondo Monetario Internacional.
Coal accounts for approximately 70% of the total energy consumed in China. This percentage share has not changed much since 1978, as shown in the graph below. It reached a peak of 76.2% in 1990, and a low of 66.3% in 2002.
Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China
Twenty five years of zinc price history put the recent rise and fall of the price of a metric tonne in perspective.
Play with the data, now updated with February 2009 prices, by clicking on the graph.
I just finished uploading January 2009 data to the historical commodity prices section. I noticed right away that the sharp fall of all commodity price indices that started in July 2008 seems to have stopped sometime between December of last year and January of this year. Take a look at the overall Commodity Price Index for example.
One data point does not a trend make, but January 2009 looks a lot better to commodity producers than December 2008.
One final note: February 2009 data will be available in approximately 30 days. I follow the IMF release schedule, which is not fixed.
Our 15-year oil price index chart shows that oil prices in November of 2008 are roughly equal to the oil prices of November 2005. The graph also shows that there was a small spike in prices in 2006, followed by a large spike that began in January 2007 and peaked in July 2008.
A 25 year chart showing the changes in the IMF oil price index puts recent changes in the price of crude oil in perspective. The chart below, showing the oil price index since November of 1983, displays the impressive run-up that started around July of 2007.
I just updated the historical commodity prices section with the latest IMF data. Historical data for 8 price indices and 49 commodities now includes June 2008 numbers. I’m including a chart showing that the aggregate commodity price index, i.e. the index that tracks energy, metals, food, and raw materials, continued its upward march in June. It increased 5.7% with respect to May 2008, 32.6% with respect to January 2008, and 62% with respect to June 2007. Inflation has clearly become a serious problem around the World.
Click on the image above to play with the data
The energy statistics section now includes regional production and consumption charts. The regions available are:
Production and consumption numbers are available for coal, crude oil, dry natural gas, hydroelectric power, natural gas plant liquids, nuclear power, and alternative fuels. Leave me a comment if you find the new charts useful.
Today I released two improvements to the commodity prices section. First, all price tables can be exported to Excel by clicking on a link located directly below the last row of each table (Example: Commodity Price Index from 1993 to 2008)
Second, the entry page now contains a graph showing the main commodity price indices.
I hope you find these two new features helpful. Your comments and feedback are welcome.
Vox is a wonderful web site I found today full of interesting analysis and comments by some of the World’s top economists. I was happy to see that my alma matter is very well represented by Olivier Blanchard, Giuseppe Bertola, Jeffrey Frankel, and others.
If you are paying particular attention to the explosive rise of commodity prices (see graph below), take a few minutes to read the articles written by Guillermo Calvo – Exploding commodity prices, lax monetary policy, and sovereign wealth funds – and by Jeffrey Frankel – An Explanation for Soaring Commodity Prices. They both suggest that commodity prices are not increasing simply because of soaring demand from China, India, and other fast-growing economies.