Macroeconomic Effects of Oil Price Fluctuations in Colombia

Abstract

This research aims to study the effects of oil price changes on the Colombian economy during 2001:Q1 to 2016:Q2. A structural vector auto-regression model in the spirit of Blanchard and Gali (2010) is estimated under a recursive identification scheme, where unexpected oil price variations are exogenous relative to the contemporaneous values of the remaining variables. Drawing on impulse-response estimates, a 10% increase in the oil price generates the following accumulated orthogonalized responses: i) a contemporaneous 0.4% increase in GDP growth, later on the effect reaches its maximum in the first quarter (1.7% increase) and starts to decay after two quarters; ii) a contemporaneous 1.2% decrease in unemployment, then the effect remains slightly negative and reaches its maximum after ten quarters (5.1% decrease); iii) a contemporaneous 0.9% decrease in inflation, followed by an 0.2% increase by quarter three, and thereafter the effect remains slightly negative.