I just released trade statistics by country and by product. Exports and imports are available for the period 2001-2005. The product groupings belong to the SITC Rev. 3 international standard. The primary data source is the commerce and trade database maintained by the United Nations.
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
I just finished a major upgrade to the thematic map engine. It can now generate color-coded maps (choropleths) for individual countries. Check out the following examples:
I have population data for several other countries. I will soon make it easier to discover which country maps are available.
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.
When writing about fluctuations in the price of commodities, you can now use our graphs to illustrate your point. For instance, take a look at the graph below. It shows the IMF Commodity Price Index (for all commodities) for the past fifteen years.
The index has increased by 281.93%!
You can draw you own conclusions, but the important point is that embedding our graphs is now as simple as copying and pasting a bit of HTML code. Clicking on the graph will let you explore other time frames or choose a different price index or commodity.
A very interesting article about bananas in the NY Times mentions the rapid rise of prices for what has been one of the lowest-priced fruits in the US. I decided to use the new commodity prices section to investigate how much prices have changed over the past twenty five years.
Over the past six months, the price of Central American and Ecuadorian bananas has increased by 43%. Between May of 2007 and May 2008 the price increased by 19% (the price peaked in March of 2008). A five year time frame shows an appreciation of 198.9%, while a 25 year time frame shows a price increase of 83.89%. There is significant volatility in the price of bananas. The lowest price within the past 25 years was USD 250.51 per metric ton in June of 1994, while the highest was USD 1027.36 in March of 2008.
Commodity prices have been in the news lately. Using data from the International Monetary Fund, you can now graph monthly prices for 55 primary commodities and data series for 9 commodity price indices. Most of the series go back to January of 1980.
The energy statistics section now includes country rankings for the production and consumption of coal, crude oil, dry natural gas, hydroelectric power, natural gas liquids, nuclear electric power, and alternative (geothermal, solar, wind, and wood waste) electric power. The source for all charts is the United States Energy Information Administration.
In the previous version, energy statistics could only be graphed for one country at a time.