The Indian economy deregulated its oil price regime and moved from state-administered to market-linked pricing. This study examines the impact of deregulation on volatility transmission between international oil prices and Indian stock markets. The findings show that due to continual interventions in the form of taxation changes and price freeze during elections, not only did the short-term spillover of oil prices on stock markets strengthen, but the long-term spillover also continues to remain, despite oil price deregulation. This implies that after moving to market-determined pricing, there should be no tinkering with the oil-pricing mechanism by policymakers to ensure the desired stability in stock markets.
Even after deregulation of pricing, the movement of retail prices of petrol and diesel is not directly related to global crude oil prices. Taxes make up around two thirds of the petrol and diesel prices paid by consumers.
This paper undertakes an examination of the differential impact of international oil prices on domestic inflation and output growth in India under two alternative scenarios. One scenario is, when domestic fuel prices are allowed a formula-based automatic alignment with international oil prices and the second, when as per current policy, fuel prices have evolved as a consequence of revisions specified periodically by the government. The differential impact analysis has been undertaken in a structural Vector Autoregressive framework using the technique of innovation accounting.
