Los efectos de la eliminación del subsidio al Diesel en la canasta básica del Ecuador

Abstract

The objective of the study is to analyze the effect of eliminating the diesel subsidy on the variation in the cost of the basic family basket (CBF) in Ecuador during the period 2020-2025. A non-experimental quantitative approach is used based on monthly time series with seventy-one observations using ARIMA and ARIMAX models with exogenous variables and dummy-type intervention (pulse and step). The dependent variable corresponds to the monthly variation in the basic basket CBF, (∆ln CBF), while the explanatory variables include the variation in consumer price index prices (∆ln CPI) and the variation in the diesel subsidy ∆ln (Subsidy). KPSS tests confirm stationarity in the transformed series (p-value = 0.1). The results shock that the transmission of the subsidy adjustment is not immediate, with a higher correlation observed in lag 3 (0.2773) than in lag 0 (-0.1108), indicating a partial transfer of costs. The ARIMAX pulse model has better predictive performance (RMS = 0.00353; MAE = 0.00353; 0.00293) than the step model, suggesting that it is a short-term shock