Reza Shakeri Bostanabad, Miss Sanaz Karimpour, Ali Emami Meibodi,
Volume 16, Issue 64 (Spring 1399 2020)
Abstract
The natural gas market is currently undergoing dramatic changes and is becoming globalized. One of the major developments in the global natural gas market in recent years is the establishment of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF). Since the founding of this forum, there have been many speculations about whether GECF would become a cartel like OPEC. Cartels contributes to the coordination of productive behavior between members and influence global prices using theirmonopoly power. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the production of Gas Exporting Countries Forum members, coordination of production behavior and decisions, and the relationship between the production of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum and global gas prices, using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag Bound Test and the Toda-Yamamoto causality test. The results of the study showed that, there is no harmony of productive behavior between members and that GECF does not influence the price of natural gas in global markets. Therefore, the assumption that GECF acts as a cartel is rejected.
JEL Classification: Q42, Q43, Q49
Keywords: Natural Gas, Gas Exporting Countries Forum, Cartel, Bound Test.