Research On The Effect Of Chinese Oil Futures Market On Oil Import Price

Along with the rapid development of global economy, every nation’s need for oil grows contiously as well as oil’s trade volume, and the fight for the control of oil all over the world has turned into a war. For our country, oil resource is in short supply, and the fast growing economy and the extensive development mode has multiplied energy consumption. Our interdependency on the import oil increases every year, right now China has become the biggest oil importing nation in the world. However, the international oil price has been experiencing frequent changes in recent years, seriously threatening our economic development and national security. Thus we should build our own oil futures market, not only to better determine and affect oil price, but also to reverse the situation that we lack discourse power on the international oil market.Previous researches on our nation’s oil futures market mostly focus on the price discovering and risk hedging functions, while ignoring the trade part of oil as a commodity, therefore weakened their practical significance. While this article analyzes the effect of China’s oil futures market on the import price, thus it’s more practical.Qualitive analysis on the futures price and import price shows that although China’s fuel oil futures market was seriously affected by policy from 2012, the futures price generally guides the import price. Then we use the monthly data of fuel oil’s import price, futures market price, import volume, output, apparent consumption volume and the USD currency rate in the recent 8 years to structure a VAR model, which shows the main factors affecting fuel oil import price are the previous month’s import price, previous two month’s USD currency rate and previous two month’s fuel oil futures price. The Granger causality test also proves that apart from 2012 to 2013, the fuel oil futures price has always been the Granger cause of import price, especially after 2008 when the fuel oil futures market grows ripe, the mutual cause-effect relationship between futures price and import price are very obvious.Based on the combination of empirical analysis and the crude oil futures about to be launched, this article gives specific suggestions on how to further improve our oil futures market.