Global oil glut and sanctions: The impact on Putin's Russia

The Russian economy is highly responsive to oil price fluctuations. At the start of 2014, the country was already suffering from the weak economic growth, partly due to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine and Western sanctions. The recent plunge in global oil prices put even further strain on the Russian economy. This paper analyzes the dynamic relationship between oil price shocks, economic sanctions, and leading macroeconomic indicators in Russia. We apply a vector autoregression (VAR) to quantify the effects of oil price shocks as well as western economic sanctions on real GDP, real effective exchange rate, inflation, real fiscal expenditures, real consumption expenditures, and external trade using quarterly data from 1999:1 until 2015:1. Our results show a significant impact of oil prices on the Russian economy. We predict that Russia's economic outlook is not very optimistic. If sanctions remain until the end of 2017, the quarter-to-quarter real GDP will contract on average by 19 percent over the next two years. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.