The Economic Effects of Oil Prices Shocks on the UK Manufacturing and Services Sectors

: This paper investigates the relationship between changes in oil prices and the UK s manufacturing and services sectors performances. Only a few studies have been conducted at the sector level; the goal of this paper is to contribute in that direction. In a more detailed analysis, three sets of Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models are employed using linear and nonlinear oil price specifications among several key macroeconomic variables. From the linear oil price specification VAR model, the impulse response function reveals that oil price movement causes positive effects in both the output of manufacturing and services sectors. The variance decomposition shows that oil prices are quite important as a cause of the variance of the UK services sector output, while they do not have such a large role in the variance of the UK s manufacturing output. From the asymmetric specification, it has been found that positive oil price changes determine a consistent contraction in manufacturing output, while the services sector does not seem to be affected by the increases. Alternatively, negative oil price changes show that manufacturing output does not increase much despite a decrease in oil prices. The services sector is much more affected by oil prices decreases than increases. Finally, considering the Net Oil Price Increase (NOPI) specification, it has been found that the manufacturing sector is much more affected by oil price changes than the services sector.