The commodity cost ripple
A price move in one raw material doesn’t stop at the mine or the field. Pick a commodity, set a price change, and see how the cost pressure spreads through every industry and economy, traced through the OECD’s input-output tables.
Estimated change in production costs, % (economy-wide average on the map, world average by industry in the bars)
The 12 country-industry pairs with the largest change
Notes: the change in the cost of producing one unit of output, before any change in margins,
taxes or retail prices: it is not a consumer-price estimate. Computed with the Leontief input-output price model,
which passes the commodity price change through every purchase of intermediate inputs, direct and indirect, assuming
fixed input shares and full pass-through; real pass-through is partial and lagged, so values are upper bounds for the short run.
Map = output-weighted average across a country’s industries; bars = output-weighted world average per industry,
excluding the industry where the shock originates. Each commodity is mapped to its nearest sector in the
45-sector tables (e.g. copper → metal-ore mining). Input-output structure of 2020.
Source: OECD Inter-Country Input-Output Tables (2020, 77 economies, 45 industries); Simdots calculation.
| Economy | Cost increase (%) |
|---|
Source & method
Model: the standard input-output cost-push / price pass-through model (Leontief price model, dp = (I − Aᵀ)⁻¹·dp₀; Miller & Blair, ch. 2). A price rise on a commodity’s extraction or agricultural sector propagates to every sector that uses it, directly and indirectly.
Data: OECD Inter-Country Input-Output (ICIO) Tables, 2020, public edition: 77 economies, 45 sectors. Coefficients computed once and shipped as CSV / JSON. The “today’s price move” button reads the current price vs its recent average from public FRED / IMF series.
- Illustrative. Assumes full cost pass-through, fixed technical coefficients, and a short run; real pass-through is partial and lagged.
- This 45-sector edition has no dedicated “copper” or “wheat” line, so each commodity is mapped to the nearest extractive or agricultural sector (crude oil & gas → oil & gas extraction; metals → metal-ore mining; grains & fibres → agriculture).
- The map shows economy-wide average cost pressure (output-weighted across a country’s sectors); the bars show the worldwide average per industry.
Licence: this page and its derived data are CC BY 4.0. OECD ICIO used under its public-edition terms.
Import tariffs come on top
The cost changes above exclude customs duties. For imported inputs, the tariff applies to the higher price as well, so in the economies below a commodity price rise costs importers more than the model shows.
Average applied import tariff, all products, % (15 highest)
Notes: effectively applied tariff (the rate actually charged, including preferential rates under
trade agreements), simple average across all product lines, latest year available for each economy (years differ). A simple
average gives every product line the same weight regardless of how much of it is imported.
Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, series TM.TAX.MRCH.SM.AR.ZS.