the effects of oil price shocks on the economies of the gulf co operation council countries nonlinear analysis abstract this paper examines the effects of oil price shocks on the real gdp of the gulf cooperation council gcc countries the empirical method used is the nonlinear cointegrating autoregressive distributed lag nardl model of shin et al 2013 in which short run and long run nonlinearities are introduced via positive and negative partial sum decompositions of the explanatory variable s the results suggest evidence of asymmetries in all the cases we find significant positive oil price changes in all the cases with the expected positive sign implying that increases in oil price lead to increases in real gdp conversely negative oil price changes are significant for only kuwait and qatar with the expected positive sign suggesting that decreases in oil price lead to decreases in their real gdp further analysis implemented using panel data shows that positive oil prices changes increase real gdp and negative changes decrease real gdp overall the results suggest that positive oil price changes have a considerably larger impact on real gdp than negative changes

a note on interest parity and the supply of arbitrage funds the divergence of the actual forward premium on foreign exchange from that dictated by the principle of interest rate parity can arise from two separately identifiable causes 1 an equilibrium position as indicated by the interest parity principle has not been reached or 2 that the principle itself is not a correctly specified equilibrium condition it is the purpose of this note to offer a revised specification of the interest parity condition and to determine whether this version approximates more closely the actual premium as determined in the market it should be made clear however that this is a partial analysis and does not deal with the impact of other forces for example speculation on the forward premium as a result a complete model of the spot and forward markets for foreign exchange such as stein s 1965 is not attempted here in general the principle of interest parity maintains that in equilibrium

variability in the effects of monetary policy on economic activity this paper documents and interprets the variability in the effects of monetary policy on economic activity using the method of rolling vector autoregression and united states data from 1959 01 to 1994 12 while i find robust support for short run price stickiness and long run output neutrality i also find that the responses of output and price levels to monetary shocks are otherwise quite variable seven episodes of differing responses are identified the effects of monetary policy are found to be stronger when monetary shocks are negative and are related to some gradual changes in the economy

when do long run identifying restrictions give reliable results many recent articles have identified behavioral disturbances in vector autoregressions by imposing restrictions on the long run effects of shocks this article demonstrates that this approach will be unreliable unless the underlying economy satisfies three types of strong restrictions although many aspects of these issues have been raised before this article draws out and illustrates the implications for inferences under the long run scheme furthermore it provides strategies for dealing with the problems

tests of the foreign exchange risk premium using the expected second moments implied by option pricing abstract this paper utilizes the second moment expectations implied by currency option pricing to demonstrate that these expectations are systematically related to expected return differentials across assets denominated in different currencies because the measured deviations from uncovered interest rate parity are tied to variables which theory links to the risk premium the results provide substantial evidence that a risk premium does indeed exist as opposed to the alternative of a violation of rational expectations however like previous attempts the data do not support an explicit mean variance formulation of the risk premium

estimating the permanent income elasticity of government expenditures evidence on wagner s law based on oil price shocks this paper provides instrumental variable estimates of the permanent income elasticity of government expenditures it uses annual variation in the international oil price weighted with countries average oil net export gdp shares as a plausibly exogenous source of within country variation in countries permanent income the short run estimates of the permanent income elasticity are robust across alternative specifications and are below one the estimated elasticity coefficients range between 0 3 and 0 6 and have standard errors of 0 1 and 0 4 respectively point estimates of long run elasticities are somewhat larger but still smaller than unity the investment component of government spending is found to be more elastic than the consumption component whereas elasticity differences between rich and poor countries are insignificant

military expenditure and the restructuring of capitalism the military industry in britain the character of the british defence industry since the 1940s has reflected a regime of accumulation which was shaped by both fordism and the cold war the decline of both these influences means that the political economy of defence spending and the internal organization of the defence industry are changing while the outbreak of peace in europe should lead to some reduction in defence spending on cold war items the world s arms industry is not about to disappear the global arms industry remains huge and is increasing beyond the control of individual national governments the concentration of capital and intensified search for markets is likely to increase the volatility of the industry and affect individual companies and nations with varying results britain may remain disproportionately important in the new military economy copyright 1990 by oxford university press

the exchange and interest rate term structure under risk aversion and rational expectations abstract recent porfolio balance models of exchange rate determination under rational expectations are extended to determine jointly the exchange rates spot and forward the interest rate and the current account with risk aversion domestic and foreign bonds are not perfect substitutes despite capital mobility so that the difference between domestic and foreign interest rates is not equal to the expected rate of depreciation or equivalently the forward rate is a biased predictor of the spot rate the forecast bias is studied following current account and money supply disturbances distinguishing among permanent or temporary and anticipated or unanticipated changes

defence procurement and industrial structure in the u k defence ministries being monopsonists with considerable regulatory authority have the power to shape the electronics aerospace and engineering industries that supply them this paper uses the u k experience to investigate whether and how the government should influence industrial structure after reviewing market structure and policy it provides a quantitative measure of the impact of the new more competitive procurement practices on the size distribution of contracts and assesses the role of policy on the likely evolution of the structure of the european arms industry

oil price shocks and real gdp growth empirical evidence for some oecd countries this study assesses empirically the effects of oil price shocks on the real economic activity of the main industrialized countries multivariate var analysis is carried out using both linear and non linear models the latter category includes three approaches employed in the literature namely the asymmetric scaled and net specifications evidence of a non linear impact of oil prices on real gdp is found in particular oil price increases are found to have an impact on gdp growth of a larger magnitude than that of oil price declines with the latter being statistically insignificant in most cases among oil importing countries oil price increases are found to have a negative impact on economic activity in all cases but japan moreover the effect of oil shocks on gdp growth differs between the two oil exporting countries in the sample with the uk being negatively affected by an oil price increase and norway benefiting from it

the effects of oil price shocks on the iranian economy abstract the iranian economy is highly vulnerable to oil price fluctuations this paper analyzes the dynamic relationship between oil price shocks and major macroeconomic variables in iran by applying a var approach the study points out the asymmetric effects of oil price shocks for instance positive as well as negative oil price shocks significantly increase inflation we find a strong positive relationship between positive oil price changes and industrial output growth unexpectedly we can only identify a marginal impact of oil price fluctuations on real government expenditures furthermore we observe the dutch disease syndrome through significant real effective exchange rate appreciation

iranian oil free zone and international oil prices abstract one of the main elements of economic sanctions against iran due to its nuclear and military programs is crude oil exportation restrictions in addition to investment in iranian energy related projects senders of such sanction are interested in understanding the impacts of such embargos on international oil prices we apply unrestricted vector autoregressive var model using impulse response functions irf and variance decomposition analysis vda tools with annual data from 1965 to 2012 to analyze the dynamic response of international oil prices to iranian oil export sanction controlling for the supply of non iranian oil the world gdp per capita and post islamic revolution exogenous dummy variables we show that international oil prices respond negatively and statistically significant to increasing shock in absolute negative changes of the iranian oil exports our proxy of iran oil sanctions following the first 2 years after shock the main reason is the positive response of the non iranian oil supply to negative shocks in iranian oil exports filling the missing supply of iranian oil in international markets

strategic responses to defence sector restructuring an analysis of lancashire based companies this paper investigates the factors affecting the likelihood of lancashire based companies involved in defence production pursuing strategic responses to defence sector restructuring data covering 100 lancashire based companies form the lancashire defence survey database which is analysed results of the data analysis are of interest to organizations involved in local economic development policy making they suggest that the effects of restructuring are most profound in large core defece companies most directly involved in defence production other effects are passed on to companies that carry out subcontracting but there is less evidence of strategies being implemented in response to structural change among these companies company size product type and degree of defence dependency are uncovered as significant factors influencing whether a strategic response is instigated

oil and the macroeconomy since world war ii all but one of the u s recessions since world war ii have been preceded typically with a lag of around three fourths of a year by a dramatic increase in the price of crude petroleum this does not mean that oil shocks caused these recessions evidence is presented however that even over the period 1948 72 this correlation is statistically significant and nonspurious supporting the proposition that oil shocks were a contributing factor in at least some of the u s recessions prior to 1972 by extension energy price increases may account for much of post opec macroeconomic performance

crude oil and the macroeconomy tests of some popular notions a note perhaps no other economic events in the post world war ii era have generated as much attention as the series of crude oil price shocks that have jolted the world economy since the opec boycott of 1973 a tremendous amount of space in the popular and professional literature has been devoted to analyzing the impacts of these shocks on the developed economies and the adjustments these shocks have induced one residual of this literature has been a general impression that since 1973 the functional relationship between crude oil prices and the developed macroeconomies has been dramatically and fundamentally altered yet to our knowledge no one has formally tested this impression recent evidence of hamilton 1983 suggests that crude oil prices had a strong impact on the u s business cycle well before 1973 further while textbook treatments of oil price shocks tend to highlight cost push inflationary effects the research of berndt and wood 1975 1979 and wilcox 1983 indicates the net complementarity between energy and capital in the u s economy is quite strong both before and after 1973 thus oil price shocks may have stronger real effects than generally believed in this paper we formally test three popular notions associated with the so called

resource rents distribution income inequality and poverty in iran abstract our goal is to examine the income inequality and welfare effects of the direct distribution of resource rents and subsequent taxation in iran we use survey based microdata that covers 140 000 individuals which include more than 36 000 iranian urban and rural households in 2009 we examine how direct distribution of oil and gas rents among all citizens and a subsequent direct income tax differ from distributional impacts of targeted policies on income inequality and poverty in iran our analysis shows that the resource dividend policy with a subsequent direct income tax has a significant decreasing effect on the household gini index while targeted policies are more effective in reducing number of households under the poverty line

dynamics of electricity consumption oil price and economic growth global perspective this study uses the data from 157 countries from 1960 to 2014 to analyze the relationship between economic growth electricity consumption oil prices capital and labor the economic growth of developing countries with industrial infrastructure has a more significant association with electricity consumption than oil prices we use oil prices and electricity consumption jointly to study highly predictive observations for economic growth the data are categorized by income oecd and regional levels the panel cointegration long run parameter estimation and pool mean group tests are used to analyze the cointegration and short run and long run relationships between the variables the empirical results indicate the presence of cointegration between the variables the presence of feedback effects between electricity consumption and economic growth oil prices and economic growth is valid these findings confirm that in spite of the oil prices developing countries rely heavily on electricity consumption for economic growth in the short run growth and feedback effects suggest that more vigorous electricity policies should be implemented to attain sustainable economic growth for the long term

short and long run asymmetric effect of oil prices and oil and gas revenues on the real gdp and economic diversification in oil dependent economy abstract the aim of this paper is to explore the short and long run asymmetric impact of oil prices shocks and oil and gas revenues changes on the total real gdp and the level of economic diversification of the qatar economy to this end two econometric approaches have been used 1 the a b structural vector autoregressive ab svarx model with exogenous variables where four different asymmetric oil prices and oil and gas revenues measures have been employed and 2 the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag nardl model the results show that in the short run the responses of both total real gdp and non oil real gdp to negative shocks on real oil prices and real oil and gas revenues are higher than the impact of positive shocks indicating evidence for the existence of asymmetric impact of shocks in the short run however the results suggest that the impact of shocks do not last more than three quarters this evidence for the existence of asymmetric behavior is also confirmed by the nardl analysis which shows that in the long run positive oil prices shocks and oil and gas revenues changes have higher impact on the two proxies of economic activity than negative changes do a result that confirms the resilience of the qatar economy to negative shocks and the positive role played by the energy sector in improving the qatar economic diversification degree finally the results show that the non oil sector is completely resilient to negative shocks in the long run as the impact of negative shocks are insignificant on the non oil real gdp several policies aimed to improve the level of economic diversification of the country and delink the government revenues from oil and gas revenues are proposed and discussed

on some international parity conditions an empirical investigation abstract this paper investigates weak semi strong and strong forms of the following international parity conditions a uncovered interest parity b the hypothesis of equal ex ante real interest rates and c ex ante purchasing power parity the main results are as follows using data which roughly cover the 1975 1984 decade we find little evidence in favor of the strong form of the parity conditions under consideration however most test results are consistent with the weak forms finally regarding the semi strong forms the results are mixed

the impact of declining oil rents on tax revenues does the shadow economy matter abstract we study the association between oil rents and tax revenues highlighting the importance of the shadow economy se as a moderating factor in this relationship declining oil rents may not lead to higher tax efforts in a state if the se is sizable using a sample of 124 countries from 1991 to 2015 our panel data regression analysis illustrates the moderating role of the se in the final effect of negative oil rent shocks on tax revenues a decline in oil rents following negative oil price shocks ceases to have any significant positive impact on tax revenues in countries with an se representing more than 35 of gross domestic product the results are robust after controlling for country and year fixed effects other determinants of tax revenues and using a dynamic model

the economic consequences of reduced uk military expenditure the last few years have seen a variety of proposals for uk disarmament for a re orientation of defence policy towards a less expensive non nuclear stance more commen surate with britain s present economic position in the world unfortunately these proposals become suddenly coy and tentative as they approach the economic implications of their programme in complete contrast to the detailed quantitative calculations they pro vide for other aspects the alternative defence commission 1983 and prins 1983 are typical examples of this the difficulties this lacuna creates are illustrated by the ordeal the labour party faced in the 1983 election campaign they advocated it appears a reduc tion of british defence expenditure which now accounts for just over 5 of gdp to about the european average of around 3 5 but they proved unable to counter the claim of the conservative defence secretary mr heseltine that this policy would cost 400 000 jobs 1 the hesitancy with which proponents of reductions in military expenditure approach the economic consequences is surprising given the near unanimity in the technical litera ture two major studies in the uk eiu 1963 and brown 1964 studies in the us leontief 1965 and a recent survey kennedy 1983 all indicate that disarmament represents an economic opportunity rather than an economic problem nonetheless the tenor of the recent policy literature suggests that it would be useful to provide a detailed assessment of the economic consequences of a reduction in uk military expenditure from 5 to 3 5 of gdp since the results obtained below are broadly in line with those of the studies cited above the contribution of this paper does not lie in the novelty of its conclusion rather it provides a detailed quantitative review of the economic issues cur rently involved in a transition to lower levels of military expenditure since there is a wide literature already available which provides arguments to suggest that such a transition could provide real security benefits the strategic aspects will only be mentioned in passing d smith 1980 and alternative defence commission 1983 provide detail on this

global oil glut and sanctions the impact on putin s russia abstract the russian economy is highly responsive to oil price fluctuations at the start of 2014 the country was already suffering from the weak economic growth partly due to the ongoing crisis in ukraine and western sanctions the recent plunge in global oil prices put even further strain on the russian economy this paper analyzes the dynamic relationship between oil price shocks economic sanctions and leading macroeconomic indicators in russia we apply a vector autoregression var to quantify the effects of oil price shocks as well as western economic sanctions on real gdp real effective exchange rate inflation real fiscal expenditures real consumption expenditures and external trade using quarterly data from 1999 1 until 2015 1 our results show a significant impact of oil prices on the russian economy we predict that russia s economic outlook is not very optimistic if sanctions remain until the end of 2017 the quarter to quarter real gdp will contract on average by 19 percent over the next two years

modeling and forecasting crude oil markets using arch type models this study investigates the time varying volatility of two major crude oil markets the west texas intermediate wti and europe brent a flexible autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch model is used to take into account the stylized volatility facts such as clustering volatility asymmetric news impact and long memory volatility among others the empirical results indicate that the intensity of long persistence volatility in the wti is greater than in the brent it is also found that for the wti the appreciation and depreciation shocks of the wti have similar impact on the resulting volatility however a leverage effect is found in brent although both the estimation and diagnostic evaluations are in favor of an asymmetric long memory arch model only the wti models provide superior in the out of sample forecasts on the other hand from the empirical out of sample forecasts it appears that the simplest parsimonious generalized arch provides the best forecasted evaluations for the brent crude oil data

assessing the regional economic impacts of defense activities a survey of methods defense activities exercised in a specific region may alter the region s economic performance an accurate assessment of the potential economic impacts of defense activities is a valuable undertaking to enable regional planners to prepare for changes the variety in the methods among others input output models economic base models keynesian regional multipliers fixed effects estimators and case study approaches inspired by geography sociology and political science can pose a dilemma we detail the historical and theoretical background of each method as well as select exemplary cases where these methods were applied by examining old and new methods we aim to construct a typology that could be valuable to all stakeholders in this sense defense economics can also contribute to the allied social sciences by outlining evaluation methods that may be applicable to other fields

do asset demand functions optimize over the mean and variance of real returns a six currency test abstract international asset demands are functions of expected returns optimal portfolio theory tells us that the coefficients in this relationship depend on the variance covariance matrix of real returns but previous estimates of the optimal portfolio 1 assume expected returns constant and 2 are not set up to test the hypothesis of mean variance optimization we use maximum likelihood estimation to impose a constraint between the coefficients and the error variance covariance matrix for a portfolio of six currencies we are able statistically to reject the constraint evidently investors are either not sophisticated enough to maximize a function of the mean and variance of end of period wealth or else are too sophisticated to do so

electricity consumption oil price and economic growth global perspective abstract the study uses the panel data of 210 countries over the period 1960 2014 to analyze the empirical relationship between economic growth electricity consumption oil price gross fixed capital formation and population while the current literature on the topic focus largely on relationship between oil consumption and economic growth while only a few presented the research studying relationship between electricity and economic growth we used oil price and electricity consumption jointly to study the highly predictive observer for economic growth furthermore the data is categorized into income oecd regional level renewable energy consumption level and oil export import countries pedroni panel cointegration fully modified ols and panel vector error correction test apply to analyze the cointegration short run and the long run relationship between the variables the results of full panel confirm a bidirectional relationship between electricity consumption and gdp oil price and gdp fixed capital formation population and gdp moreover the results confirm that countries using non renewable sources for electricity generating such as through coal and oil the electricity consumption of these countries exhibit a negative relationship with the economic growth furthermore the finding varies across income oecd and regional renewable energy consumption level

price of oil and world inflation and recession new evidence shows that the commonly held assumption that the 1973 74 oil price increase directly affected us and world inflation and subsequent recession is consistent with the empirical data an extended lucas varro real income equation applied to the us united kingdom canada france germany italy japan and the netherlands gives mixed results partly because of price control and decontrol programs simulation experiments on the price control variable using us data finds strong effects further studies can be made when consistent international data is available for the 1979 80 period 18 references 4 figures 3 tables dck

the political economy of military expenditure an introduction this paper shows that although the military burden has declined since the korean war in the oecd it still represents an important component of government spending the magnitude of military spending does not provide a measure of its importance to the economy the relation between military spending and accumulation has to be seen as a complex historical dialectical process in which military spending plays a contradictory role the other contributions to the symposium are then discussed within this framework they deal with the empirical analysis of the economic costs of military spending the impact of changing military spending and the problems of conversion copyright 1990 by oxford university press

what happened to the oil price macroeconomy relationship abstract strong evidence is found that oil prices no longer granger cause many u s macroeconomic indicator variables in data after 1973 a number of potential explanations are explored that sample stability issues are responsible that oil prices are now endogenous and that linear and symmetric specifications misrepresent the form of the oil price interaction none of these hypotheses are supported by the data the opec price increases do appear to have had significant impacts while the effects of the price declines of the 1980s are smaller and harder to characterize these results have potentially important implications for the large body of research which utilizes oil prices as an instrumental or explanatory variable

inflation employment and the dutch disease in oil exporting countries a short run disequilibrium analysis the author uses nontraded goods and labor shortages in the gulf countries the decline of the traded goods sector in oil producers dutch disease and the absence of employment benefits of higher oil revenues in latin american oil producers higher oil revenues can be likened to a transfer putting pressure on non oil traded nt goods prices and drawing resources out of the t sector the slope of the wage indexation line determines whether classical unemployment or repressed inflation results various policy measures are analyzed 3 references 8 figures

booming sector and de industrialisation in a small open economy this paper presents a theoretical analysis of the dutch disease the phenomenon whereby a boom in one traded goods sector squeezes porfitability in other traded goods sectors both by directly bi

estimation of portfolio balance functions that are mean variance optimizing the mark and the dollar abstract this paper offers a way of efficiently estimating the parameters in demand functions for mark and dollar assets the technique imposes the constraint that the parameters rather than being determined arbitrarily are based on investors optimizing behavior regarding expected returns and variances it dominates some previous empirical applications of finance theory in the respect that the expected returns are allowed to vary from period to period which is a necessary feature of any macro model the constraint that the parameters are based on mean variance optimization is also tested and not rejected

this is what happened to the oil price macroeconomy relationship abstract many of the quarterly oil price increases observed since 1985 are corrections to even bigger oil price decreases the previous quarter when one looks at the net increase in oil prices over the year recent data are consistent with the historical correlation between oil shocks and recessions

impact of oil price shocks on selected macroeconomic variables in nigeria abstract the impact of oil price shocks on the macroeconomy has received a great deal of attention since the 1970 s initially many empirical studies found a significant negative effect between oil price shocks and gdp but more recently empirical studies have reported an insignificant relationship between oil shocks and the macroeconomy a key feature of existing research is that it applies predominantly to advanced oil importing countries for oil exporting countries different conclusions are expected but this can only be ascertained empirically this study conducts an empirical analysis of the effects of oil price shocks on a developing country oil exporter nigeria our findings showed that oil price shocks do not have a major impact on most macroeconomic variables in nigeria the results of the granger causality tests impulse response functions and variance decomposition analysis all showed that different measures of linear and positive oil shocks have not caused output government expenditure inflation and the real exchange rate the tests support the existence of asymmetric effects of oil price shocks because we find that negative oil shocks significantly cause output and the real exchange rate

oil revenue shocks and government spending behavior in iran abstract oil revenues play an important role in the political economy of iran on average 60 of the iranian government revenues and 90 of export revenues originate from oil and gas resources current international sanctions on iran have mainly targeted the oil production capacity of iran and its exports to the global markets in this study we analyze the dynamic effects of oil shocks on different categories of the iranian government expenditures from 1959 to 2007 using impulse response functions irf and variance decomposition analysis vdc techniques the main results show that iran s military and security expenditures significantly respond to a shock in oil revenues or oil prices while social spending components do not show significant reactions to such shocks

multiscale entropy analysis of crude oil price dynamics abstract price formation in crude oil markets is the result of the action of many participants e g producers governments speculators etc whose effects are perceived at different time scales from days to years the diversity of participants as well as the occurrence of extreme socio political events yields a market with complex price evolution this paper uses entropy methods to monitor the evolution of crude oil price movements as the complexity of the price can depend of the time horizon entropy computations are performed for different time scales via low pass filtering of the price difference dynamics the results are interpreted in term of relative market efficiency concepts in the sense that high entropy values should be related to a more complex and hence less predictable market evolution it is shown that the highest market efficiency is found for small time scales up to one or two weeks the multiscale entropy pattern for high time scales longer than one quarter is interesting as it shows alternating periods of high and low entropy levels interestingly this alternating pattern has a dominant spectral component of about 4 3 years which could be related to macroeconomic kitchin business cycles it is shown that u s recessions in the recent 25 years are coincident with periods of reduced entropy levels meaning that during economic downturn the long run market complexity is drastically reduced the possible effects of extreme events e g iraq war are analyzed in terms of the relative market efficiency suggesting that some events have affected the short term but not the long term market complexity overall these results show that methods based on entropy concepts can shed light on the structure of crude oil markets as well as on its link to macroeconomic conditions and socio political extreme events

impact of oil price shocks on output inflation and the real exchange rate evidence from selected asean countries this article analyses the impact of oil price shocks on real output inflation and the real exchange rate in thailand malaysia singapore the philippines and indonesia asean 5 using a structural var model the cointegration tests indicate that the macroeconomic variables of these countries are cointegrated and share common trends in the long run the impulse response functions reveal that oil price fluctuations do not impact the asean 5 economies in the long run and much of its effect is absorbed within five to six quarters the variance decomposition results further assert that with a few exceptions oil price shocks do not explain a significant variation in any of the variables under consideration we also identify a very unique pattern of response to oil price fluctuations between malaysia and singapore and between the philippines and thailand the pairs exhibit a high degree of similarity in their responses they do not share any commonalities across the group

oil price shocks stock market economic activity and employment in greece abstract using a multivariate vector autoregression var approach this paper attempts to shed light into the dynamic relationship among oil prices real stock prices interest rates real economic activity and employment for greece the empirical evidence suggests that oil price changes affect real economic activity and employment oil prices are important in explaining stock price movements stock returns do not lead to changes in real activity and employment

the forward exchange rate and macroeconomics abstract this paper discusses the conditions under which a risk premium is incorporated in the forward exchange rate a new condition for the existence of a risk premium is proposed we show that earlier models of the risk premium which emphasize either the role of net foreign investment or of the relative supplies of outside assets are not suited for assessing the effects of changes in macroeconomic policy

conversion policy in the uk the democratization of eastern europe the disintegration of the warsaw pact the proposed strategic arms reduction talks start and the conventional forces in europe cfe agreements are concrete evidence of the end to the cold war for nato these events have precipitated an overhaul of strategic policies resulting in major cutbacks in the defence budgets of member states in the u k this has given rise to a growing debate on the economic effects of cuts in the military burden and the possible benefits to be derived from what has become popularly labelled the peace dividend however the way in which resources are transformed for the military into civil use and the interpretation of the objectives of the conversion process lie at the centre of a controversy about the optimal use of the peace dividend this paper provides a critical assessment of the contributions to this debate copyright 1990 by oxford university press

estimation of direct and indirect impact of oil price on growth abstract using a new methodology this paper measures the direct and indirect effects of oil prices on gdp growth of 12 economies because of the indirect effect which is transmitted through a trade matrix even the net oil exporters like indonesia and malaysia cannot escape the negative influence of high oil prices

shocks effects of macroeconomic variables on natural gas consumption in nigeria structural var with sign restrictions abstract this paper has examined the transmission of shocks from macroeconomic variables namely money supply inflation exchange rate and real gdp onto natural gas consumption using structural var svar model with sign restrictions the results revealed that both in the short run and long run natural gas consumption responds significantly to the shocks emanating from money supply and real gdp while its response to inflation shock is significant only in the short run but exchange rate shock is not significant however money supply has contributed greater proportion of the shocks followed by the real gdp inflation and exchange rate in the ordering of the variance decomposition the paper recommends that nigerian authorities adjust the monetary policy tools towards regulating the money supply and checking the inflation rate to ensure increased demand for natural gas and sustained economic growth on the response of natural gas consumption to the shock in the exchange rate since the shock is positive though insignificant it implies that depreciation of the exchange rate can discourage the demand for foreign exchange imports and boost the local production which would reciprocally lead to more natural gas consumption and improved growth in the country

the effect of global oil price shocks on china s agricultural commodities abstract this paper studied the effect of global oil price shocks on agricultural commodities in china including strong wheat corn soybean bean pulp cotton and natural rubber we regarded oil price volatility process as a combination of continuous process and jump process we not only separated oil price shocks into positive and negative categories to identify different effects on agricultural commodities in continuous process but also investigated how jump behavior influenced these agricultural commodities we found that the oil price was characterized by volatility clustering and jump behavior at the same time oil price shocks had different effects on agricultural commodities in addition the shocks on most agricultural commodities were asymmetric only natural rubber was under influence of the jump intensity of the oil price in contrast to strong wheat corn soybean bean pulp and cotton

forward exchange rates as predictors of future spot rates and the efficiency of the foreign exchange market abstract the theory of informationally efficient markets emit is applied to the foreign exchange market and some of its operational implications are illustrated the emit is joined with alternative models of the equilibrium return on the foreign exchange market the pure expectations hypothesis the modern theory and tentative formulations of return as a function of risk the alternative joint hypotheses are rejected by the data but this does not necessarily imply the rejection of emit the rejection may be due to the inadequacies of the equilibrium return models used notwithstanding the fact that the risk premium has been captured to a certain extent in the empirical tests and the evidence against the emit weakened

the role of portuguese electricity generation regimes and industrial production abstract this paper examines how renewables special regime simultaneously interact with conventional sources ordinary regime within the portuguese electricity generation system there is also an appraisal of the relationship between these two regimes and economic activity using the industrial production index first difference var modelling was applied for monthly data for the time span of 2007 m1 to 2012 m10 the appropriateness of the var is proved the relationship between variables develops within a structure of endogeneity i e they generate feedback and may be both explained and explaining variables simultaneously the outcomes show a strong complementarity between the ordinary and special regimes economic activity causes electricity consumption but only the special regime causes economic activity moreover the non renewable component of the special regime does not cause a need for backup from either the ordinary regime or imports contributing to a reduction in energy dependency

forecasting in cointegrated systems we consider the implications for forecast accuracy of imposing unit roots and cointegrating restrictions in linear systems of i 1 variables in levels differences and cointegrated combinations asymptotic formulae are obtained for multi step forecast error variances for each representation alternative measures of forecast accuracy are discussed finite sample behaviour in a bivariate model is studied by monte carlo using control variables we also analyse the interaction between unit roots and cointegrating restrictions and intercepts in the dgp some of the issues are illustrated with an empirical example of forecasting the demand for m1 in the uk

the changing geography of the military industry in britain lovering j 1991 the changing geography of the military industry in britain reg studies 25 279 293 a number of studies have suggested that defence spending has had a significant impact on the location of industry and the geography of labour markets this paper drawing on a recent study of the employment of research and development professionals in the uk defence industry confirms that defence spending and related employment has been concentrated in the south and west of england it also shows that a number of changes are underway the unusually large british defence industry is restructuring as a result of changes in supply and in demand following the end of the cold war major job losses are in process which may amount to a third of a million jobs in the 1990s this is associated with a spatial reorganization the effect of which is generally to consolidate high level activities in the industry in the south of england and deepen the spatial division of labour a key locational influence in this

oil price collapse and challenges to economic transformation of saudi arabia a time series analysis abstract this paper studies the impact of oil price changes on economic growth in saudi arabia to measure its dependency on the crude oil sector to this end an on off threshold regression is specified to allow the oil gdp relationship to be asymmetric nonlinear and time varying with regard to the business cycle phases further we empirically test the diversification hypothesis put forward by the national transformation program saudi vision 2030 to check whether the equity energy investment initiative could boost economic growth in saudi arabia first our findings confirm the contribution of the oil sector to economic growth in the country but also show that the oil saudi economy relationship exhibits nonlinearity and threshold effects as the impact of oil price varies per regime depending on the state of the market second in line with the vision 2030 expectations we are in favor of transforming the economy and opening its equity market we also quantify a positive and significant impact of equity investment on the saudi arabian economy further this diversification route will stimulate a beneficial oil effect on the real economy

assessing forecast performance in a cointegrated system this paper examines the forecast performance of a cointegrated system relative to the forecast performance of a comparable var that fails to recognize that the system is characterized by cointegration the cointegrated system we examine is composed of three vectors a money demand representation a fisher equation and a risk premium captured by an interest rate differential the forecasts produced by the vector error correction model vecm associated with this system are compared with those obtained from a corresponding differenced vector autoregression dvar as well as a vector autoregression based upon the levels of the data lvar forecast evaluation is conducted using both the full system criterion proposed by clements and hendry 1993 and by comparing forecast performance for specific variables overall our findings suggest that selective forecast performance improvement especially at long forecast horizons may be observed by incorporating knowledge of cointegration rank our general conclusion is that when the advantage of incorporating cointegration appears it is generally at longer forecast horizons this is consistent with the predictions of engle and yoo 1987 but we also find consistent with clements and hendry 1995 that relative gain in forecast performance clearly depends upon the chosen data transformation

macroeconomic performance of oil price shocks outlier evidence from nineteen major oil related countries regions abstract as a special energy commodity oil price shocks can affect not only the energy market but also the performance of the macroeconomy this research provides complementary explanations for nineteen major oil related countries regions macroeconomic effects caused by unexpected oil price changes it focuses on the macroeconomic performance of oil price shocks from outlier perspective investigating the inner hidden factors of co movements between oil price shocks and macroeconomy three methods called empirical covariance ec method robust covariance rc method and one class support vector machine svm method are used in the outlier detection empirical results show that a one class svm method has the best environmental adaptability for detecting the outlier performance of the co movements between oil price shocks and macroeconomy followed by ec and rc methods b according to the time axis the outlier performances of gross domestic production consumer price index and unemployment rate are all concentrated in 2005 2014 which is highly consistent with the oil price shock process and c according to the spatial axis countries four categories with similar outlier performances are obtained outlier performance of macroeconomy of oil related country region in lower levels seems to be worse than that of the country region in higher levels which can be attributed to more attentions paid by higher leveled oil related countries on the oil price shock response system to relieve the severe macroeconomic impacts caused by oil price shocks

oil and the macroeconomy when prices go up and down an extension of hamilton s results in an important paper hamilton 1983 demonstrated a strong correlation between oil price changes and gross national product growth in u s data however his study pertained to a period in which all the large oil price movements were upward and thus it left unanswered the question whether the correlation persists in periods of price decline moreover the price variable he used was somewhat distorted by price controls in the 1970s this note investigates whether hamilton s results continue to hold when the sample is extended to include the recent oil market collapse and the oil price variable is corrected for the effects of price controls particular attention is given to the possibility of asymmetric responses to oil price increases and decreases as suggested in the structural employment literature loungani 1986 davis 1987 hamilton 1988 like hamilton i based my investigation on the gnp equation in sims s 1 980b six variable quarterly vector autoregressive model

efficiency of crude oil markets evidences from informational entropy analysis abstract the role of crude oil as the main energy source for the global economic activity has motivated the discussion about the dynamics and causes of crude oil price changes an accurate understanding of the issue should provide important guidelines for the design of optimal policies and government budget planning using daily data for wti over the period january 1986 march 2011 we analyze the evolution of the informational complexity and efficiency for the crude oil market through multiscale entropy analysis the results indicated that the crude oil market is informationally efficient over the scrutinized period except for two periods that correspond to the early 1990s and late 2000s us recessions overall the results showed that deregulation has improved the operation of the market in the sense of making returns less predictable on the other hand there is some evidence that the probability of having a severe us economic recession increases as the informational efficiency decreases which indicates that returns from crude oil markets are less uncertain during economic downturns