Geopolitics, Global Patterns of Oil Trade, and China¡¦s Oil Security Quest

Sergey Mityakov, Heiwai Tang and Kevin Tsui ()

No 322011, Working Papers from Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research

Abstract: Does China's quest for oil raise tensions with the United States? This paper examines the effect of international relations on global oil trade patterns. Using voting records for the United Nations General Assembly to measure the state of international relations, we estimate a modified gravity model in a panel data framework over the period 1962-2000. Our presumption is that a divergence in voting patterns reflects misalignment in political interests among pairs of states, and hence an increase in "political distance." Controlling for oil exporters' endowment, potential supply disruption due to civil conflict, other standard gravity controls, as well as exporter and year fixed effects, we first show that private energy companies based in the United States import significantly less crude oil from US political opponents. The result is robust to controlling for economic sanctions and militarized interstate disputes, suggesting that the political oil import diversification is more than a wartime phenomenon. A similar oil import pattern is observed in China, in which case only a few national oil companies control the oil sector. While the incentives to diversify are stronger for both the United States and China when the exporters are nondemocratic, import sanctions have opposite effects on oil imports into the United States and China. Finally, we document that there is no such oil import pattern in other non-major power oil importing countries.

Keywords: Energy Security; International Relations; Oil Trade Diversification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 F51 F59 Q34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2011-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-ene and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.hkimr.org/uploads/publication/48/ub_ful ... o-32_2011-final-.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.hkimr.org/uploads/publication/48/ub_full_0_2_298_wp-no-32_2011-final-.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> http://www.aof.org.hk/research/HKIMR/uploads/publication/48/ub_full_0_2_298_wp-no-32_2011-final-.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.aof.org.hk/research/HKIMR/uploads/publication/48/ub_full_0_2_298_wp-no-32_2011-final-.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hkm:wpaper:322011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by HKIMR ().