A Forecast of Pumped Fuel Prices in Morocco Using ARIMAModel

Abstract

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has caused a rise in global oil prices. In 2022, the cost of pumping diesel and gasoline—the two fuels most commonly used to power automotive engines—rose to all-time highs, particularly for importers like Morocco, which is dependent on Russian energy supply. As a result, Morocco's inflation rate increased to 8.25% as people worried about whether or not oil prices would continue to soar. In order to provide an answer, this paper uses autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) to forecast diesel and gasoline prices for the next eight years based on average yearly price values from 1991 to 2022. A MATLAB script is developed to compare the available models; the one with the lowest mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) will be the best for making predictions. Based on the results, the ARIMA models with parameters (3, 1, 2) and (4, 1, 0) are suggested for predicting annual diesel and gasoline prices. Diesel prices look like they'll be staying within a narrow range of $1.1 and $1.45 until 2030. However, gasoline prices are expected to increase and reach a peak of $1.56 per liter in 2030.