Crude oil, average, 1960–2026

Definition

Monthly average price in nominal US dollars.

What the series shows

The series runs from 1960-01 to 2026-09 (801 months of data). It moved from 1.60 to 102.30 USD per barrel, a change of 6,293.8%. The highest value was 132.80 in 2008-07 and the lowest 1.20 in 1970-01.

Using it in a thesis

Indicators like this one are typical control or explanatory variables in macro and finance theses: merge the CSV with your other series on the year column, check for missing years before running a regression, and log-transform level variables that grow over time. If you use the series in a panel with other countries, take every country from the same source and vintage so the definitions match. Cite the original publisher, not this site, as shown below.

Last 36 months

How to cite (APA 7)

World Bank. (2026). Crude oil, average [Data set]. World Bank Commodity Price Data (The Pink Sheet). https://www.worldbank.org/en/research/commodity-markets

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Retrieved 2026-11-02. The CSV has one row per period with the variable name pink_crude_oil_average, ready for Stata, R or SPSS.

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