Kilian - Zhou Commodity Index

This Real Economic Activity Commodity Index of Kilian - Zhou tracks commodity prices via shipping activity.

FRED has this index from the Dallas Fed, developed by Lutz Kilian, that measures global real economic activity in industrial commodity markets. This index has some advantages, compared with standard measures of global real GDP or global industrial production. See Kilian and Zhou (2018) for all the details. For now, here are three:

1. This business-cycle index is expressed in percent deviations from trend.
2. It’s derived from a panel of dollar-denominated global bulk dry cargo shipping rates
3. It may be viewed as a proxy for the volume of shipping in global industrial commodity markets.