International Trade and Oil Shocks Effects on Global Economy

Oil is one of the major drivers of the economic activities across the world. Oil prices affect the economies of both oil-importing and oil-exporting countries directly and indirectly through trade. In this paper, direct and indirect (spillovers) effects of oil price shocks on developed and developing oil exporting and importing countries are estimated using the Vector Auto-regression method. We measure the direct and indirect effects of international trade within the framework of a dynamic model and the data on thirty countries with more than 73 percent of the world’s economy for the period 1980-2015. The results show that rising oil prices affect oil-importing countries directly and indirect effects are negative for developed countries. The effect of rising oil prices in developed oil exporting countries is negative, which could be due to high share of their manufacturing industries. The impact of oil price shocks on the economies of developing oil exporting countries is also positive, but its indirect effect is negative due to the high trading of these countries with the oil-importing developed countries. JEL Classification: F00, F40, O40, Q43