Revisiting the Macroeconomic Effects of Oil and Food Price Shocks to Pakistan Economy: A Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) Analysis

This study examines the impact of global food and oil price shocks and their transmission channels to the selected macroeconomic variables including the inflation rate, output, money balances, interest rate and real effective exchange rate for Pakistan using monthly data over the period 1990M1–2011M7. An empirical analysis is carried out by employing a structural vector autoregressive framework to identify different structural shocks and explore the relative contribution of oil and food price shocks. Generalised impulse response functions and generalised forecast variance decompositions are employed to track the impact of oil and food price shocks on Pakistan's economy. The results suggest that oil price shocks negatively affect industrial production, appreciates real effective exchange rate and positively affect inflation, either the shocks are positive or negative. Only the oil and food price shocks have asymmetric impact on the short-term interest rate. In contrast, following the positive (or negative) food price shock, industrial output, interest rate and inflation rate respond positively. However, the variation in interest rate due to food price shock is relatively larger than that of oil price shocks. Generalised impulse response functions reveal that real effective exchange rate is the most important source of disturbances following either oil price or food price shocks. Generalised forecast variance decompositions analysis also supports the findings based on generalised impulse response functions. The results clearly reveal that oil and food price shocks significantly affect output, short-term interest rate, inflation rate and the real effective exchange rate. However, among all, real effective exchange rate has been a dominant source of variation in Pakistan. This implies that supply-side and demand-side disturbances originated by external shocks are the major sources of variation in output and inflation in Pakistan.