Which imports really matter for inflation

Thanks to the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, we are experiencing rising inflation all over the globe again. Obviously, being cut off from the world’s most important commodity (crude oil) drives this inflation impact. But what about all the other commodities like natural gas, fertilisers, helium, etc., that experience supply chain disruptions? How much do they matter for inflation?

Clearly, a commodity like helium is used only in very specific applications, like semiconductor manufacturing, where it can cause a lot of disruption to supply chains. But from a macroeconomic perspective, helium is used so little that it hardly influences consumer prices overall.

Meanwhile, crude oil is used almost everywhere, so being cut off from its supply creates a large impact first on energy inflation and then on consumer price inflation in general.

Niccolo Consonni and Glenn Magerman did something interesting. They tried to identify the commodities and imports in the EU that had the biggest influence on sector inflation and, from there, on overall consumer price inflation. Hence, they tried to identify the combined effect of import dependency, price elasticity to changes in supplies and price elasticity to changes in varieties of imports. The resulting number is what they call the Strategic Dependency Index for each import, and it puts into perspective how much different commodities matter.

The chart below shows the top 20 strategic products imported to the EU as of 2019 (the last year for which full data is available). Note that I had to cut the bar for crude oil short because its strategic importance is (in this case literally) off the scale. For the EU, disruptions in crude oil supply are eight times more important than disruptions in LNG supplies and a hundred times more important than almost all other imports.

Top 20 strategic imports in the EU

Source: Consonni and Magerman (2026)

But once you look beyond crude oil and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), you start to get some surprises. Coffee is the fourth most strategically important product for the EU, and cocoa is the fifth. You may laugh about this, but if coffee and cocoa supplies get disrupted, it really matters for inflation in the EU because we drink so much coffee and eat so much chocolate that the impact is quite sizeable.

And we don’t even want to start mentioning all the rioting in the streets when we can’t get our morning coffee anymore. In the Second World War in Germany, people survived on ‘Muckefuck’ (no, it’s not pronounced that way), which was a coffee substitute made from grain or beets, you can still buy something like it in German supermarkets as Caro coffee substitute, and it was so important that it was one of the most important rations during the war in Germany in order to keep morale up. Coffee truly is strategically important, whether you like it or not.