Oil And The Macroeconomy : Empirical evidence from 10 OECD countries

This paper examines the oil price-macro economy relationship by means of analyzing the impact ofoil price on Industrial production, real effective exchange rate, long term interest rate and inflation rate for a sample of ten OECD countries using quarterly data for the period 1970q1-2011q1.The impact of oil price shock on industrial production is negative and occurs with a lag of one year. However, the impact has weakened considerably compared to the 1970s. The impact on real effective exchange rate is negative/positive for a net importer/exporter, and the magnitude of the shock depends on the county´s share of net import/export of total world demand/supply. Interest rates are affected negatively, through increase in inflation rates following the oil price shock. The effect tends to die out after 5-8 quarters following the shock for most of the variables and countries. This paper also applies alternative methods to test for unit root and cointegration, which takes into account for structural breaks in the data. The weakness of Phillips-Peron test is clearly demonstrated in the case of inflation rates and interest rates, where the test falsely considered the series to be non-stationary when they in fact are stationary around a structural break. There is also strong evidence of cointegration between oil price and inflation rates and between oil price and interest rates, especially when taking account for structural breaks.This study also highlights the relevance of oil scarcity and oil peak theory. It is shown that these two terms should receive more attention than they have received so far as more oilexporters have reached their production peaks and more are likely to be followed. According to the data, renewable source of energy are not likely to dominate OECD countries energy mix in the short term, instead, there is a trend of increasing natural gas consumption among most of OECD countries. Natural gas markets are likely to play an equal role in the future as oil markets do today. The dilemma that importing countries are facing today, particularly in Europe, is whether to expose their markets to Russia or to the Middle East