Analyzing the Effect of Oil Price Fluctuation on East Africa’s Foreign Exchange Ratevolatility

Abstract

Oil is one of the major sources of energy in the world today, therefore many sectors of the economy are directly or indirectly dependent on oil as a source of energy. These has made oil price fluctuation to one of the most sort after macroeconomic variable due to its potential effects on the global economy. The primary objective of this paper was to investigate the effects of oil price shocks on foreign exchange rate of the three East African countries using SVAR analysis for the period from 1990 to 2022. Our empirical evidence confirmed that the increase in the price of crude oil in leads to a positive change in foreign exchange to the Dollar, the SVAR estimation confirmed positive significant effect of oil price fluctuation on foreign exchange trends, the results of the IRF pointed out oil price fluctuation positively affect the East Africa’s foreign exchange performance and finally the FEVD of oil price fluctuation on foreign exchange reflected that there exist indirect effects of oil price fluctuation on foreign exchange as well as foreign exchange influencing oil price after the second period. Based on these findings we therefore conclude that crude oil price fluctuations contribute significantly to the foreign exchange variability in the East African countries and hence affecting other sectors of the economy inversely.It is on this ground that we recommend adoption of policies that will reduce this effect on this countries, to start with to reduce the burden the countries should look for alternative locally available source of power that include adoption of Bi-diesel, compressed methane that can be source from sugar cane give the un tapped potential of sugar can in the three countries. In addition, the countries can consider price hedging of oil purchases where the countries enter into contract with their oil supplies for a constant crude oil price over the contract period.