This paper investigates the response of consumer price inflation to changes in domestic fuel prices, looking at the different categories of the overall consumer price index (CPI). We then combine household survey data with the CPI components to construct a CPI index for the poorest and richest income quintiles with the view to assess the distributional impact of the pass-through. To undertake this analysis, the paper provides an update to the Global Monthly Retail Fuel Price Database, expanding the product coverage to premium and regular fuels, the time dimension to December 2020, and the sample to 190 countries. Three key findings stand out. First, the response of inflation to gasoline price shocks is smaller, but more persistent and broad-based in developing economies than in advanced economies. Second, we show that past studies using crude oil prices instead of retail fuel prices to estimate the pass-through to inflation significantly underestimate it. Third, while the purchasing power of all households declines as fuel prices increase, the distributional impact is progressive. But the progressivity phases out within 6 months after the shock in advanced economies, whereas it persists beyond a year in developing countries.

This paper assesses the dynamic pass-through of crude oil price shocks to retail fuel prices using a novel database on monthly retail fuel prices for 162 countries. The impulse response functions suggest that on average, a one cent increase in crude oil prices per liter translates into a 1.2 cent increase in the retail gasoline price at peak level six months after the shock. However, the estimates vary significantly across country groups, ranging from about 0.5 cent in MENA countries to two cents in advanced economies. The results also show that positive oil price shocks have a larger impact than negative price shocks on the retail gasoline price. Finally, the paper underscores the importance of the new dataset in refining estimates of the fiscal cost of incomplete pass-through.

Excerpt from Implications of the Recent Diesel Fuel Price Increases for the Commercial Motor Carrier Industry: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Surface Transportation of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, United States Senate, One Hundred Third Congress, First Session; November 18, 1993 I am very pleased to call the Surface Transportation Subcommit tee to order to consider the cause and effects of the recent diesel fuel price increases. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.