Trade Balance and Oil Shocks in African Oil Exporting Countries

This paper is driven by the vast influence oil money have on the current account balance of major oil producing countries in Africa and the role policy measures could play to soften these effects. Dwelling on the nonlinear techniques, two types of Threshold Regression were used to estimate data on 8 African countries from 1995-2019. The results show evidence of nonlinear impacts of oil revenue on the current account balances of the 8 countries. The nature of the impact relies significantly on the levels of the threshold variable. Precisely, the estimated threshold benchmark for financial development was 33.34; below this threshold the sensitivity of current account balance to crude-oil shocks is higher and the probability of policy measures to mitigate the effects is low and, beyond the threshold the sensitivity of current account balance to crude-oil shocks is low and the probability of policy measure to mitigate the effects is higher. The finding suggested among others that crude-oil shocks is not the primary problem of the current account imbalance of oil-exporting countries rather the nature of the domestic economic policy environment.

The Dynamic Impact of Structural Oil Price Shocks on the Macroeconomy

In this paper, we apply the structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model to decompose the international oil price shock into oil supply shocks, aggregate demand shocks and oil-specific demand shocks, and then use the DCC-GARCH model to analyse the dynamic correlations between these three kinds of oil price shocks and the macroeconomic variables of several oil importing and exporting countries. To quantify the intensity of the effect of oil shocks on these variables, we propose a measure, conditional expectation (CoE), to capture the percent change of the economic variable under oil price shocks relative to the median state. The time-varying copula model is employed to estimate the proposed measure through time. The empirical results show that, for instance, the impacts of oil price shocks on macroeconomic variables are different in different periods, showing the time-varying characteristics. Additionally, the impacts of oil price shocks on macroeconomic variables show great differences and some similarities among different countries. Finally, we give some policy suggestions for these countries, in particular for China’s special results.