>Flash Economics (ECONOMIC RESEARCH)

Are there OECD countries that have an interest in high oil prices?

High oil prices reduce global activity because the propensity to save is higher in oil-exporting countries than in oil-importing countries. However, some OECD countries could, on the contrary, benefit from additional growth (income) when oil prices rise. The characteristics of such countries are as follows:

− they have very large and stable market shares in oil-producing countries, which implies that their exports to these countries increase significantly when oil prices rise (e.g. Germany and Sweden);

− they benefit significantly from the falling interest rates (rising asset prices) resulting from the investment of oil-producing countries' surpluses in the markets (this is true for all countries, especially those in the euro zone).

Germany could therefore be a country that benefits from higher oil prices, but not the United States and Japan which export very little to oil-producing countries, and not France and Spain which export little to these countries.

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