Declaration In accordance with the Regulations for Higher Degrees by Research, I hereby declare that the whole thesis now submitted for the candidature of Doctor of Philosophy is a result of my own research and independent work except where reference is made to published literature. I also hereby certify that the work embodied in this thesis has not already been submitted in any substance for a...

The present study was aimed to investigate the effects of oil price shocks on discretionary fiscal policies in selected OPEC countries during 1980-2015. In this regard, the heterogeneous dynamic reaction to structural shock was examined using Panel Structural Vector Autoregressive (PSVAR) technique. Based on the findings, the effect of oil price shocks on discretionary fiscal policy was positiv...

This study revisits the OPEC cartel hypothesis using a case study. A test is conducted to see if Venezuela has its production Granger cause its OPEC quota or whether the OPEC quota for Venezuela Granger causes Venezuelan production. The results show both occur at different times. In the short run, OPEC’s oil production quota for Venezuela Granger causes Venezuelan production. However, shortly a...

Building on the political economy literature, we develop a conceptual model and apply it to explain the OPEC pricing behavior. We model OPEC as a cartel-of-nations where politician use two instruments: production quotas and domestic fuel consumption subsidies. Our model explains the wedge between domestic fuel prices in OPEC countries and in the rest of the world. The empirical estimates show t...

this research studies the application of hybrid algorithms for predicting the prices of crude oil. brent crude oil price data and hybrid intelligent algorithm (time delay neural network, probabilistic neural network, and fuzzy logic) were used to build intelligent decision support systems for predicting crude oil prices. the proposed model was able to predict future crude oil prices from august...

One of the objectives of OPEC is the security of demand for the crude oil exports of its members. Achieving this objective is imperative with the projected decline in OECD countries' crude oil demand among other crude oil demand shocks. This paper focuses on determining the external crude oil demand security risks of OPEC member states. In assessing these risks, this study introduces two indexe...

We estimate the effects of unexpected changes in oil prices on output for the case of Venezuela, an oil-exporting economy. Following Hamilton (2003), Lee et al. (1995), and Mork (1989), we estimate measures of oil shocks and determine the effect of these shocks on the Venezuelan economy. Our results suggest that oil shocks have had positive and significant effects on output growth in Venezuela ...