The Impacts of Oil Rents on Fiscal Balance

Data used in the regression model are described in this section. The dependent variable is the fiscal balance measured in constant dollars, from the International Monetary Fund (Fiscal Monitor) 2016. A set of control variables are also included to alleviate the effect of omitted variables bias; these include Debt to GDP ratio, Real GDP per Capita, Government Expenditure (Size), Interest rate, unemployment rate, inflation rate, and control of corruption index. Real GDP and Debt to GDP are specified in Natural logs.

Data of 20 selected oil dependent economies, and 61 net oil exporting economies (all listed in the appendix), as classified by the World Bank; Kuwait, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Angola, Oman, Azerbaijan, Venezuela, Chad, Brunei, Kazakhstan, Iran, UAE, Ecuador, Algeria, Nigeria, Russia, Qatar, Norway and Mexico within 2000 – 2015, and 1991 – 2015 respectively. All have annual data for the period under consideration, and all the variables are taken from International Monetary Fund, except Real GDP per capita constant and Oil rents, which are taken from WDI dataset 2015.