Title:
THE IMPACT OF OIL PRICE VOLATILITY ON IRAQI ECONOMY 1980-2015

Authors:
Asam Mohamed AlJebory

Abstract:
Iraqi economy is suffering from high dependency on oil revenue as the only significant source of financing the economic development and government expenditure. So any fluctuation in oil revenue will be transferred directly into government revenue, and then to its ability to fund economic and development programs, and meet the social responsibilities of being the big employer of Iraq economy. This will make Iraqi economy venerable to any exogenous shock of oil prices. Our study explores the impact of positive and negative oil price shock on macro variables of the Iraqi economy. We applied the VAR model to estimate the model with three scenarios of shocks. The first one is the historical oil prices and how the Iraqi economy responding to a shock in it. The second model presenting the positive shock of oil real price and the third model is to capture the negative impact of oil real price shock. We used the Impulse Response Function (IRF) to test the effect of an oil shock on Iraqi macro variables. This will provide us with qualitative measure of the impact of a shock in oil prices on Iraqi economy. To capture the quantitative effect of our VAR models, we employed the Variance Decomposition Analysis. The empirical results show that Iraqi economy is widely opened and venerable to positive and negative oil price shocks. We concludes that decision makers has to take the diversity of government revenues issue seriously in order to increase Iraqi economy resistant and immunity to oil external shocks.