We estimate income elasticities of demand for three energy and six base metal commodities and their group aggregates. The elasticities, which vary with income levels, are estimated using a panel autoregressive distributed lag model covering the period 1965–2017, for up to 63 countries. We report three findings. First, most income elasticities are inversely proportional to income and decline rapidly as income rises. This implies commodity demand growth slows as economies develop, consistent with the dematerialization hypothesis. At median per capita income levels, the elasticity for metals (in aggregate) was 0.9, while that of energy was 0.7. Second, there is significant heterogeneity between commodities, both in terms of income elasticities and in terms of the performance of the model, with larger commodities and group aggregates performing better. Finally, we find evidence of substitution between commodities (e.g. oil/coal, aluminum/copper), estimated by the inclusion of the prices of similar commodities.

中文翻译：

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收入和替代在商品需求中的作用

我们估计了三种能源和六种基本金属商品及其组合总量的需求收入弹性。弹性随收入水平而变化，使用面板自回归分布滞后模型估计，覆盖 1965-2017 年期间，多达 63 个国家。我们报告了三个发现。首先，大多数收入弹性与收入成反比，并随着收入的增加而迅速下降。这意味着随着经济的发展，商品需求增长会放缓，这与非物质化假设一致。在人均收入水平中位数，金属（总体）的弹性为 0.9，而能源的弹性为 0.7。其次，在收入弹性和模型表现方面，商品之间存在显着的异质性，较大的商品和群体总量表现更好。