Building a GVAR Model for the Russian Economy

ABSTRACT

The relationship between the economies of various countries and their dependence on the world markets indicate that for econometric analysis of the impact of external shocks on a particular economy, it is necessary to use a model of the global economy. The aim of this paper is to build a global vector autoregression model (GVAR), including Russia as one of the regions, and to obtain the impact of some external economic shocks on Russian macroeconomic indicators. We build a model that includes 41 of the world's major economies, including Russia, and the oil market. The special features of our model are structural shifts in the dynamics of Russian output and the new specification of oil supply and oil demand. Impulse response functions are used to obtain quantitative estimates. In this paper, we analyze the reaction of outputs, oil production volumes and oil prices in response to the output shocks of China and the United States. In response to the negative shock of output in the world's leading economies, outputs in the rest of the world declined for at least the first year after the shock. There was also a significant decline in oil prices and no significant change in oil production volumes in most countries. In addition, as part of the conditional forecast, we estimated the impact of the decline in global demand due to the Covid-19 pandemic on the Russian GDP as 1,3% drop. The rest of the decline in Russian GDP can be attributed to the internal effects of the pandemic (lockdown). We also obtained a scenario forecast of the dynamics of Russian GDP depending on a decrease in trade and Russian oil price discount, within which the fall in Russian output could reach 3.3% in 2022. © 2023 Publishing House of the Higher School of Economics. All rights reserved.