Do Oil and Gas Revenues Promote Economic Diversification in Qatar?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the short- and long-run asymmetric impact of oil prices shocks and oil and gas revenues changes on the total real GDP, and the level of economic diversification of the Qatar economy. To this end, two econometric approaches have been used: (1) the A-B structural vector autoregressive (AB - SVARX) model with exogenous variables where four different asymmetric oil prices and oil and gas revenues measures have been employed, and (2) the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model. The results show that, in the short-run, the responses of both total real GDP and non-oil real GDP to negative shocks on real oil prices and real oil and gas revenues are higher than the impact of positive shocks, indicating evidence for the existence of asymmetric impact of shocks in the short-run. However, the results suggest that the impact of shocks do not last more than three quarters. This evidence for the existence of asymmetric behavior is also confirmed by the NARDL analysis, which shows that, in the long-run, positive oil prices shocks and oil and gas revenues changes have higher impact on the two proxies of economic activity than negative changes do. A result that confirms the resilience of the Qatar economy to negative shocks and the positive role played by the energy sector in improving the Qatar economic diversification degree. Finally, the results show that the non-oil sector is completely resilient to negative shocks in the long run as the impact of negative shocks are insignificant on the non-oil real GDP. Several policies aimed to improve the level of economic diversification of the country and delink the government revenues from oil and gas revenues are proposed and discussed.