Us Crude Oil Price Analysis

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Contents

Introduction        

Purpose        

Outline        

Method        

Topic background        

DATA ANALYSIS:        

CONCLUSION:        

REFERENCES:        

APPENDIX        

Introduction

          Crude oil, historically considered as one of the most importance resources on the Earth, has raised its significance within recent years as its market is now widely known as the largest commodity market in the world. What is interesting about this product is that crude oil may probably one of the very few ones in the commodity market that can have both positive and negative effects on the economy. Therefore, it is undoubtedly that the significance of oil even turns out to be related with the up-and-down moments of GDP, and the relationship between them is usually speculated by analysts.

Within this report, the scope is narrowly put to show a brief overview of oil price and GDP in US in the recession period (2007-2012), with hopes of giving a piece of useful information about the two indicators.

Purpose

This report seeks to provide an evaluation of the fluctuation of US oil prices during from 2007 to 2012 and its relative relationship with the country’s GDP growth during the same period.

There will be two questions proposed in this reports:

• How did the crude oil prices fluctuate from 1997 to 2012?
• Do US GDP growth and oil price move in the same direction during this period?

Outline

The first section gives an introduction to the topic discussed in the report. The second section provides some information and analysis of oil prices as well as its relationship with US GDP growth during 2 periods: before and after US recession in 2008, using some theoretical tools about statistics. The final section deals with the conclusion of the essay, followed by the sources of data and charts which are referred in the appendix.

Method

The analysis is descriptive, including detailed information of two indicators: US GDP growth and crude oil price. Due to the limitation of time, the data was sourced in the Internet then was processed via Microsoft Excel and Megastat.  

During the report, some analytic tools in statistics are used and listed below:

• Descriptive Statistics (Mean, Median, Variation, Quartiles and so on)
• Scatterplot
• Correlation Matrix
• Frequency Distribution

Topic background

 Early years of 20th century marked the bust of innovations. Scientist discovered many different products that have inputs from oil in every industry.  The appearance of car engines did lead to the skyrocketed demands for crude oil products. Between 1950 and 1973, the world oil industry grew nine fold with a rate of increase is 10% per year, up to 57 million barrels per day, half of which was the USA. The USA, the biggest economy in the world and consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil production, consumed 20.7 millions of barrels, which is more than any nations and equaled to the consumption of the next five largest national consumers (China, Japan, Germany, Russia and India). During this period, USA also became a net importer of oil. Although the country produced 8.5 million barrels per day, it consumes even more with 20.5 million barrels per day and the majority of the consumption is imported.