An Empirical Growth Model for Major Oil Exporters

Hadi Esfahani (), Kamiar Mohaddes and Mohammad Pesaran

No 6468, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper develops a long-run growth model for a major oil exporting economy and derives conditions under which oil revenues are likely to have a lasting impact. This approach contrasts with the standard literature on the "Dutch disease" and the "resource curse", which primarily focuses on short-run implications of a temporary resource discovery. Under certain regularity conditions and assuming a Cobb-Douglas production function, it is shown that (log) oil exports enter the long-run output equation with a coefficient equal to the share of capital (?). The long-run theory is tested using quarterly data on nine major oil economies, six of which are current members of OPEC (Iran, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela), plus Indonesia which is a former member, and Mexico and Norway, which are members of the OECD. Overall, the test results support the long-run theory. The existence of long-run relations between real output, foreign output and real oil income is established for six of the nine economies considered. The exceptions, Mexico and Norway, do not possess sufficient oil reserves for oil income to have lasting impacts on their economies. At their current production rates, the proven oil reserves of Mexico and Norway are expected to last 9 and 10 years respectively, as compared to reserve-production ratios of OPEC members, which lie in the range of 45 to 125 years. For Indonesia, whose share of oil income in GDP has been declining steadily over the past three decades, the theory suggests that the effect of oil income on the economy's steady state growth rate will vanish eventually, and this is indeed confirmed by the results. Sensible estimates of ? are also obtained across the six economies with long-run output equations, and impulse responses are provided for the effects of shocks to oil income and foreign output in these economies.

Keywords: OPEC member countries; major oil exporters; long run and error correcting relations; growth models; oil exports and foreign output shocks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 C53 E17 F43 F47 Q32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2012-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-ene and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Published - published in: Journal of Applied Econometrics, 2014, 29 (1), 1-21

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Related works:
Journal Article: AN EMPIRICAL GROWTH MODEL FOR MAJOR OIL EXPORTERS (2014)
Working Paper: An Empirical Growth Model for Major Oil Exporters (2012)
Working Paper: An Empirical Growth Model for Major Oil Exporters (2012)
Working Paper: An Empirical Growth Model for Major Oil Exporters (2012)
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