Monetary Policy’s Impact on Oil Prices During and After the Pandemic: A Systematic Literature Review

The largest oil-price disruption in decades has produced divergent evidence on the monetary policy–oil price nexus. This article explains that divergence by developing the Monetary Policy–International Oil Transmission and Effects Framework (MPITEF), a six-dimension framework, applied in a two-phase systematic review of the pandemic and post-pandemic period. Phase 1 builds the framework from 145 foundational studies; Phase 2 applies it to 55 empirical studies from 2020 to 2026 under a reproducible protocol with blind double-coding and identification-strength tiers. Three conclusions emerge from the reviewed corpus. First, studies in the strongest tier treat oil prices, the dollar, and interest rates as a simultaneously determined system rather than a one-way channel; the relationship is bidirectional and regime-dependent. Second, oil-to-inflation pass-through intensified during 2020–2023 in most economies, working mainly through inflation expectations, strongest at the zero lower bound. Third, the limited coverage of the nexus is structural: the same pandemic conditions that make oil most inflationary also remove the variation that identifies the policy response. No study integrates more than three dimensions. This review turns that gap into an agenda, reframing the nexus as a regime-contingent, state-dependent system and equipping future research with a validated framework for its integrated analysis.