Fiscal Programs and Metals Demand: Government Spending as a Commodity Demand Driver

Government infrastructure and industrial-policy spending has become a dominant demand-side variable across the base-metals complex, yet the transmission from appropriation to physical procurement is slower and more uneven than headline program totals imply. This report sizes the demand pull embedded in the main programs active in late 2025: the US infrastructure act, still only partly disbursed against a roughly $700 billion authorization; China's multi-trillion-yuan grid and infrastructure allocation for 2025; and the EU's defense build-out toward several hundred billion euros through 2030. Applying public-investment multipliers against metal-intensity coefficients by spending category, it derives demand-equivalent tonnage for copper, aluminum, steel, and selected critical minerals, and shows through a disbursement-lag analysis that the peak demand pulse is deferred to the 2027 to 2029 window.