Drawing on a large number of diverse sources, How China Disrupted Global Commodities comprehensively and systematically evidences the trends in the prices of different sets of commodities, analyses the drivers of China’s demand for commodities the factors constraining global supply and in the role which the financialisation of commodities is playing in constraining commodity production. It also documents and the growing role of China as a foreign investor in the commodities sectors. All of these trends are woven together to explore the fabric of strategic choices confronting public and private sector decision-makers.

This note assesses empirically the role Chinese activity plays in global commodities markets, showing that the strength of China’s economic activity has a significant bearing on commodity prices, but that the impact differs across commodity markets, with industrial production shocks having a substantial impact on metals and crude oil prices and less so on food prices. The size of the impact on the prices of specific commodities varies with China’s footprint in the market for those commodities; the empirical estimates indicate that, over a one-year horizon, a 1 percent increase in industrial production leads to a 5–7 percent rise in metals and fuel prices. The surprise component in Chinese industrial production announcements has a bearing on commodity prices that is comparable in magnitude to that of industrial production surprises in the United States, and this impact is much larger when global risk aversion is high.

We study the effect of a domestic shock in China on the real economy and financial markets of a commodity exporting country. We estimate a dynamic factor model using Bayesian methods to identify a China factor and a global factor using monthly macroeconomic data from China and rest of the world. We, then, assess implications of the China factor on global commodity prices and macroeconomy of a commodity exporting nation in a reduced form Bayesian VAR. A negative China shock causes fall in global commodity prices leading to output loss and stock market fall in these countries. China shock affects output of only a subset of countries in our sample compared to US shock, which affects all countries. Stock markets of commodity dependent countries respond strongly and more quickly to China shock than to US shock. China shock also has more persistent effect on commodity prices than US shock.

This paper examines the effects of China's monetary policy on global commodity prices over the quarterly period 1990:1-2021:4. Using a Bayesian Structural VAR model, we identify shocks to the interest rate as a price rule and the monetary aggregate (M2) as a quantity rule in China and evaluate their impacts on those commodity prices. Those prices include indices for the aggregate commodity price index and its six major individual constituents. Our results suggest that a positive interest rate shock has a negative and persistent effect on commodity prices. Additionally, beverages and metals are the commodities whose prices fall most in response to changes in the Chinese monetary policy. In what concerns the positive shock to the growth rate of the monetary aggregate, we find that the non-fuel commodities, agricultural raw materials, and metals prices are highly responsive to changes in the growth rate of M2. In contrast, the highly volatile food prices, and fuel (energy) commodity prices are less affected by this shock. Moreover, we show that while adjusting the growth rate of the monetary aggregate and changing the interest rates appear to be important macroeconomic stabilizing tools, the quantity instrument seems more effective than the price instrument in explaining the dynamics of commodity prices. Finally, monetary expansions and interest rate hikes are associated with a temporary rise in world uncertainty.

Since 1980, China has evolved from a poor and mostly rural society into one of the largest economies in the world. As it grew into a major industrial power, it demanded enormous amounts of steel for new factories and cities, copper for electronic wires, petroleum for cars and manufacturing plants, and soybeans and cattle to feed its workers. By the 1990s, many Latin American countries were riding China's coattails and beginning to prosper from the new demand. Ever since China entered the World Trade Organization at the turn of the century, Latin America supplied China with more and more of the primary commodities it needs and more. That in turn has produced one the most impressive periods of economic growth on the continent in fifty years. And it was more evenly spread too - a region infamous for its extreme inequality saw it decline by a couple of percentage points over the course of the era. In The China Triangle, Kevin P. Gallagher traces the development of the China-Latin America trade over time and covers how it has affected the centuries-old (and highly unequal) US-Latin American relationship. He argues that despite these opportunities Latin American nations have little to show for riding the coattails of the 'China Boom' and now face significant challenges in the next decades as China's economy slows down and shifts more toward consumption and services. While the Latin American region saw significant economic growth due to China's rise over the past decades, Latin Americans saved very little of the windfall profits it earned even as the region saw a significant hollowing of its industrial base. What is more, commodity-led growth during the China boom reignited social and environmental conflicts across the region. Scholars and reporters have covered the Chinese expansion into East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australasia, Africa, the US, and Europe. Yet China's penetration Latin America is as little understood as it is significant-especially for America given its longstanding ties to the region. Gallagher provides a clear overview of China's growing economic ties with Latin America and points to ways that Latin American nations, China, and even the United States can act in order to make the next decades of China-Latin America economic activity more prosperous for all involved.

China's prosperity is at the core of the emerging Platinum Age of global economic growth. Rapid economic growth has been underpinned by expansion in its domestic markets, and the integration of domestic and international markets in goods, services, capital, labour and foreign exchange. Global commodity prices have reached historic highs, while Chinas capital outflows have helped to hold down interest rates worldwide. Linking markets, both domestic and international, has been key to Chinas success. In sustaining its strong economic growth, China has become one of the worlds most voracious consumers of energy. The challenge now facing the government and people of China is in achieving cooperation with the international community to avert the costs - both economic and environmental - of accelerating energy consumption. CHINA: LINKING MARKETS FOR GROWTH gathers together leading scholars on Chinas economic success and its effect on the world economy into the next few decades.

In the early 2000s, Chinese demand for imported commodities ballooned as the country continued its breakneck economic growth. Simultaneously, global markets in metals and fuels experienced a boom of unprecedented extent and duration. Meanwhile, resource-rich states in the Global South from Argentina to Angola began to advance a range of new development strategies, breaking away from the economic orthodoxies to which they had long appeared tied. In China’s Wake reveals the surprising connections among these three phenomena. Nicholas Jepson shows how Chinese demand not only transformed commodity markets but also provided resource-rich states with the financial leeway to set their own policy agendas, insulated from the constraints and pressures of capital markets and multilateral creditors such as the International Monetary Fund. He combines analysis of China-led structural change with fine-grained detail on how the boom played out across fifteen different resource-rich countries. Jepson identifies five types of response to boom conditions among resource exporters, each one corresponding to a particular pattern of domestic social and political dynamics. Three of these represent fundamental breaks with dominant liberal orthodoxy—and would have been infeasible without spiraling Chinese demand. Jepson also examines the end of the boom and its consequences, as well as the possible implications of future China-driven upheavals. Combining a novel theoretical approach with detailed empirical analysis at national and global scales, In China’s Wake is an important contribution to global political economy and international development studies.

China’s trade patterns are evolving. While it started in light manufacturing and the assembly of more sophisticated products as part of global supply chains, China is now moving up the value chain, “onshoring” the production of higher-value-added upstream products and moving into more sophisticated downstream products as well. At the same time, with its wages rising, it has started to exit some lower-end, more labor-intensive sectors. These changes are taking place in the broader context of China’s rebalancing—away from exports and toward domestic demand, and within the latter, away from investment and toward consumption—and as a consequence, demand for some commodity imports is slowing, while consumption imports are slowly rising. The evolution of Chinese trade, investment, and consumption patterns offers opportunities and challenges to low-wage, low-income countries, including China’s neighbors in the Mekong region. Cambodia, Lao P.D.R., Myanmar, and Vietnam (the CLMV) are all open economies that are highly integrated with China. Rebalancing in China may mean less of a role for commodity exports from the region, but at the same time, the CLMV’s low labor costs suggest that manufacturing assembly for export could take off as China becomes less competitive, and as China itself demands more consumption items. Labor costs, however, are only part of the story. The CLMV will need to strengthen their infrastructure, education, governance, and trade regimes, and also run sound macro policies in order to capitalize fully on the opportunities presented by China’s transformation. With such policy efforts, the CLMV could see their trade and integration with global supply chains grow dramatically in the coming years.

Shocks to aggregate activity in China have a significant and persistent short-run impact on the price of oil and some base metals. In contrast, shocks to apparent commodity-specific consumption (in part reflecting inventory demand) have no effect on commodity prices. China’s impact on world commodity markets is rising but, perhaps surprisingly, remains smaller than that of the United States. This is mainly due to the dynamics of real activity growth shocks in the U.S, which tend to be more persistent and have larger effects on the rest of the world.