Oil price shocks and Sudan’s current account

This paper aims at examining the relationship between oil price shocks and the current account in Sudan. The Vector Auto-Regression model is employed using quarterly data over the period 2000:q1 – 2011:q2. The main findings suggest that negative and positive shocks have impacted current account and trade balances in a symmetric fashion. Granger cause test shows that oil price increases and decreases have significant effect on current account balance. Impulse response functions have shown that the initial response of trade and current account balances to positive and negative shocks is statistically significant. Variance decomposition analysis suggests that negative oil price shocks are responsible of the major variations other than the variables own shocks.