Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Petroleum and Spanish CPI

Javier took a look at the historical relationship between Brent petroleum prices in euros and Spanish CPI - and came up with a simple model.

The base case assumes the average euro price for Brent crude for the first ten days of  March - 54.10€ - holds throughout 2015. The dashed red line in the chart on the left shows the the model's expected contribution of the price of crude to consumer price inflation for this scenario. The solid red line shows the same real data to date.

With the euro/dollar exchange rate held constant at early March levels, here are the model's projections for Spanish end-of-year CPI based on ten dollar per barrel changes in the price of Brent petroleum.

Average inflation rates for 2015 would look something like this:

36 € -1.1%
45 € -1.2%
Base -0.9%
63 € -0.8%
72 € -0.6%
82 € -0.5%
91 € -0.4%



Javier GarcĂ­a Echegaray and Charles Butler