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While the so-called "Great Recession" officially ended in June 2009, the labor market remains stagnant. In September 2011, the unemployment rate remained above nine percent—it has fallen below that threshold for only 2 of the last 29 months—and nearly 45%of the unemployed had been out of work for more than six months.
A central question for macroeconomists and financial analysts alike is what caused the dramatic surge in the real price of oil between 2003 and mid-2008. The structural VAR model of Kilian (2009a) implies that this surge was driven by repeated positive shocks to the demand for industrial commodities including crude oil. This model relies on the use of a proxy for fluctuations in global real economic activity based on dry cargo ocean shipping freight rates.
Further analysis in Kilian (2009a) based on a linearly detrended index of OECD industrial production as an alternative proxy for global real economic activity suggests that the unexpected increase in the demand for oil after 2002 was not driven primarily by unexpectedly high growth in the OECD, but by unexpected growth from countries outside of the OECD. This finding is consistent with the widespread perception that much of the recent boom in industrial commodity markets was driven by the economic transformation of countries in emerging Asia such as China and India.
