Impacts of OPEC's political risk on the international crude oil prices: An empirical analysis based on the SVAR models

The impacts of OPEC's political risk on the fluctuations of international crude oil prices have caused widespread concern and analyzing the impacts is of great significance to the investment decisions and risk aversion strategies in the crude oil markets. Therefore, using the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) index as a proxy for the countries' political risk situation, we empirically investigate the impacts of OPEC's political risk on the Brent crude oil prices, based on several Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) models. The main empirical results indicate that: (1) The political risk of OPEC countries does have a significant and positive influence on Brent crude oil prices in the sample period from January 1998 to September 2014, and the most significant positive influences appear in about one and a half year and last about a year. (2) OPEC's integrated political risk contributes to 17.58% of the oil price fluctuations in the sample period, which is only lesser than that of the oil demand shocks (34.64%). (3) Compared with the political risk of OPEC countries in North Africa and South America, the political risk of OPEC countries in the Middle East contributes most to the oil price fluctuations. (4) Among the eight components of the political risk in OPEC, the internal conflicts contribute most to the oil price fluctuations in the sample period.