• Energy Research

In this paper, we examine the effects of world energy price shocks on China's macroeconomy over the past two decades. We begin by showing that the use of oil prices as a proxy for more general energy price dynamics is not appropriate for the case of China. Having established this fact, we propose a new energy price index which accurately reflects the structure of China's energy expenditure shares, and intertemporal fluctuations in international energy prices. We then employ a sufficiently rich set of time varying VARs, identified through a new set of agnostic sign restrictions, to estimate the effects of energy price shocks on China's macroeconomy. Our main result is that positive energy price shocks generate statistically significant reductions in real GDP growth and increases in inflation. Interestingly, both the sets of responses have consistently declined over the sample period. Next, the interest rate responses are found to be consistently positive over the sample period. Given the aforementioned stagflation result, this suggests that the PBOC is more focused on inflation stabilization as compared to facilitating output growth. All presented results are shown to be robust under both official national data and those developed by Chang et al. (2015), thus strengthening our conclusion that energy price shocks have significant time varying effects on China's macroeconomy.

We employ a class of time-varying Bayesian vector autoregressive (VAR) models on new standard dataset of China's GDP constructed by Chang et al. (2015) to examine the relationship between China's economic growth and global oil market fluctuations between 1992Q1 and 2015Q3. We find that: (1) the time varying parameter VAR with stochastic volatility provides a better fit as compared to it's constant counterparts; (2) the impacts of intertemporal global oil price shocks on China's output are often small and temporary in nature; (3) oil supply and specific oil demand shocks generally produce negative movements in China's GDP growth whilst oil demand shocks tend to have positive effects; (4) domestic output shocks have no significant impact on price or quantity movements within the global oil market. The results are generally robust to three commonly employed indicators of global economic activity: Kilian's global real economic activity index, the metal price index and the global industrial production index, and two alternative oil price metrics: the US refiners' acquisition cost for imported crude oil and the West Texas Intermediate price of crude oil.

AbstractIn this paper, we provide direct evidence for an increasingly critical role of China in the world oil markets. Specifically, our empirical results confirm that the influence of China's oil demand on the oil price of the world has increased over time and surpassed that of the United States. The contribution of demand perspective from China are formally quantified by three key variables of world oil market, which are world oil production, real economic activity and the real price of crude oil. The impact of oil demand from China is used to compared with those from other oil markets, including shocks from the United States. We also construct suitable proxies that reflect real economic activity from these economies, and identify them via a structural vector autoregressive model to disentangle the influence of oil demand from China, the United States and the rest of the world. Our results confirm the finding of recent research, which is the increasing demand for oil from developing countries has become a key driver of the price of oil.