Oil Price – Inflation Nexus: A Case Study of South Africa and Nigeria

Kelechi Ojukwu 21 PAGES (6412 WORDS) Economics Paper

The goal of this research is to examine the impact of oil price on inflation rates in South Africa and Nigeria- thereby comparing inflation nexus between oil rich and non-oil rich African nations. To accomplish this task the authors have utilized yearly oil price and inflation data from the period of 1987 – 2016 (source: World Bank), thus providing 30 data observations.

An ARDL modeling approach has been deemed most appropriate in this analysis due to limited sample data. Our result revealed that South Africa inflation data is somewhat resilient to oil price fluctuations during that period of study indicating lack of dependence on changing oil price effect but rather to change in previous South Africa inflation rate; while on the other hand, the change in Nigeria inflation is found to be quite dependent on change in oil price and previous year’s inflation rate change.