What Level of Oil Supply Growth is Needed to Support World GDP Growth?

A few days ago, I showed the close relationship between growth in world oil consumption and growth in world GDP. In this post, I will extend that analysis by building a model that shows how much of an increase in world oil supply is need for a given increase in world GDP. This model indicates that if we want the world economy to grow by 4% per year, world oil supply will need to grow by 3% per year. This is more than world oil supply has grown per year since the 1970s–giving a clue as to why the world is having so much problem with economic growth now.

Theoretically, the model should also be able to predict what would happen on the downside as well–what would happen if world oil supply should suddenly start to contract. We will talk about what these indications are, but also discuss why they are probably misleading. The result may very well be quite a bit worse than the model predicts.

In my earlier post, we saw that over time, both the rate of growth in oil supply was declining, and the rate of growth in GDP was declining. In both the previous and the current post, we are looking at “real” GDP growth–that is GDP growth, with the inflation component removed.

Read more: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/What-Level-of-Oil-Supply-Growth-is-Needed-to-Support-World-GDP-Growth.html