HWWI Commodity Price Index: A Technical Documentation of the 2023 Revision

Abstract

The HWWI Commodity Price Index, which aims at reflecting price developments of raw materials imported by highly industrialized countries, dates back to the 1950s. This paper explains the calculation of the index at the example of its latest revision, which became effective on 1st September 2023. While the index and its subindices are still calculated for OECD and European Momentary Union countries at four different frequencies (annual, monthly, quarterly and daily) for two different currencies (USD, EUR), it now additionally includes index values for several weighting periods (long-term: 2012–2021, pre-crisis: 2017–2019 and crisis years: 2020–2021), for individual countries and for different perspectives (daily revised, real-time and historical time series). The paper also provides detailed information on the employed methodology and the input data (commodities, import data, prices) used to calculate the weights and the index values. Although the revision is not without effect on the resulting index values, especially throughout the crises periods, the correlation between the initial and the revised index remains very high.