Why have the recent oil price declines not stimulated global economic growth?

We analyze the global relationship between oil prices, commodity-specific financial marketshocks and economic activity by means of Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) models for the period 1996 - 2015. For the financial market variables in our model, we use a breakdown of G-20 countries into net commodity exporting and importing countries to compute the real exchange rate between the country groups as well as the corresponding interest rate spread. Regarding the discussion about the missing expansionary effects of the recent oil price declines at the global level, our empirical framework tests the following transmission: A downgrading of financial conditions for commodity exporting countries can lead to a more serious decline of their domestic demand as should be expected from the pure income effect of lower export revenues due to lower oil prices. Therefore, missing expansionary effects of the recent oil price declines should not only be traced back to the absence of expansionary monetary policy effects at the zero lower bound in many commodity importing countries, but also to a high dependency of commodity exporting countries on international financial markets.