Business Cycles in Oil Exporting Countries: A Declining Role for Oil?

In this paper, we investigate business cycle regularities in oil exporting countries. We ask the question whether oil exporting countries are all alike or whether economic fluctuations and the response dynamics of macroeconomic variables are similar. Besides we also test for the possible sources of economic fluctuations and whether the oil is the main culprit behind business cycles in oil exporting countries. In this paper, we use different empirical methodologies to gain insights about the nature of the business cycles in the oil exporting countries. First, we draw on annual data to document stylized facts on economic fluctuations in these economies. Second, we also use principle component analysis and extract principle component of the panel on economic variables of the countries under the study. Third, we invoke to the methodology proposed by Giannone, Lenza and Primiceri (2012) to analyze impulse-response functions of GDP, household consumption, government expenditure, investment and import in 13 oil exporting countries under the study. In this study, we investigate the nature and possible sources of economic fluctuations in oil exporting countries using principle component and impulse-response analysis. The principal component analysis shows that the first two components can be statistically significantly explained by world GDP, but not by oil prices. We further develop our study using impulse-response analysis and find that a global demand shock is as important as oil supply and oil demand shocks in determining the dynamics of macroeconomic variables of interest. Though previous studies in this field underline the importance of institutional factors, we find that rising global political and economic integration can play a critical role in explaining business cycles of these economies. With increasing integration into the world economic system, oil exporting countries have become more susceptible to world business cycles, the sources of economic fluctuations have become more diversified, and consequently, the role of oil has declined over time. These results have crucial policy implications for the role of the fiscal and monetary policy in managing economic fluctuations in these economies.