THE EFFECT OF CRUDE OIL PRICE VOLATILITY ON INFLATION IN INDIA: EVIDENCE FROM ARDL APPROACH

Abstract

India has been experiencing the issue of rising crude oil prices since 2017, after a low-price regime from 2014 to 2017. Inflation was also moderate during the low-crude oil price regime. It has been empirically seen that a rise in crude oil prices exerts a significant impact on the inflationary situation of the nation. Rising oil prices and their spillover into higher general price levels might exacerbate the crisis in a nation that is already struggling with the declining demand for investment and consumption. The domestic oil price needs to be controlled by the government to boost demand while controlling inflation without putting further stress on the populace. Against this background, the present research aims to investigate the relationship between the crude oil price and the inflation rate in the nation using the data from 1991 to 2020 (before Covid years). This paper also aims to investigate the effect of crude oil prices and inflation on economic growth in India. The paper has used an Autoregressive Distributed lag model to investigate the long-run and short-run association between them. Our analysis shows that the prices of crude oil have a statistically significant impact on India’s inflation rate over the long and short terms. KEYWORDS: Inflation, Crude oil price, India, Spillover, ARDL, Granger Causality, GDP