Oil In The World Economy

This book discusses the oil industry and its impact on the world economy in the twentieth century. It examines the importance of oil in different sectors, from 1900-1973 and stresses the relevance of oil as a factor in modern economic history not only in national terms but also within an international context. The book includes chapters on American policy towards developing economies in the first half of the 20th century; the policy of Russian oil exports in the 20s and 30s; the financing of the German and French oil industries; and the role of oil in the Japanese economy, a major industrial country without oil resources. On the international front, the book covers the impact of the Middle East national oil companies, the effect of oil on the developing countries of South Ameirca and the relevance of the oil crisis of 1973.

This paper presents a simple macroeconomic model of the oil market. The model incorporates features of oil supply such as depletion, endogenous oil exploration and extraction, as well as features of oil demand such as the secular increase in demand from emerging-market economies, usage efficiency, and endogenous demand responses. The model provides, inter alia, a useful analytical framework to explore the effects of: a change in world GDP growth; a change in the efficiency of oil usage; and a change in the supply of oil. Notwithstanding that shale oil production today is more responsive to prices than conventional oil, our analysis suggests that an era of prolonged low oil prices is likely to be followed by a period where oil prices overshoot their long-term upward trend.

This paper, using a six-region DSGE model of the world economy, assesses the GDP and current account implications of permanent oil supply shocks hitting the world economy at an unspecified future date. For modest-sized shocks and conventional production technologies the effects are modest. But for larger shocks, for elasticities of substitution that decline as oil usage is reduced to a minimum, and for production functions in which oil acts as a critical enabler of technologies, GDP growth could drop significantly. Also, oil prices could become so high that smooth adjustment, as assumed in the model, may become very difficult.

The oil price increases of the 1970s left deep marks on the world economy. They led to a massive redistribution of income in favor of oil-producing countries, and caused serious disruption of growth, imbalances in foreign trade, and problems of stability in oil-importing countries. Despite the present levelling off, the authors suggest that more price increases remain a distinct possibility.Oil and the International Economy examines the effects of rising oil prices on the international financial system and identifies ways that oil-importing countries can overcome the financial and adjustment problems caused by them. The authors project the long-term trend in real oil prices and present economic policy options to help avoid future financial problems for industrialized and developing nations alike.

Nine economists examine the effect of quadrupled oil prices on the world economy, weigh the merits of the various monetary and fiscal policies adapted in response, and explore how the adjustment problem is likely to change in the future.

The recent plunge in oil prices has brought into question the generally accepted view that lower oil prices are good for the United States and the global economy. In this paper, using a quarterly multi-country econometric model, we first show that a fall in oil prices tends relatively quickly to lower interest rates and inflation in most countries, and increase global real equity prices. The effects on real output are positive, although they take longer to materialize (around four quarters after the shock). We then re-examine the effects of low oil prices on the U.S. economy over different sub-periods using monthly observations on real oil prices, real equity prices and real dividends. We confirm the perverse positive relationship between oil and equity prices over the period since the 2008 financial crisis highlighted in the recent literature, but show that this relationship has been unstable when considered over the longer time period of 1946–2016. In contrast, we find a stable negative relationship between oil prices and real dividends which we argue is a better proxy for economic activity (as compared to equity prices). On the supply side, the effects of lower oil prices differ widely across the different oil producers, and could be perverse initially, as some of the major oil producers try to compensate their loss of revenues by raising production. Taking demand and supply adjustments to oil price changes as a whole, we conclude that oil markets equilibrate but rather slowly, with large episodic swings between low and high oil prices.