This paper examines the effects of oil price shocks on the real GDP of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The empirical method used is the nonlinear cointegrating autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model of Shin et al. (2013) in which short-run and long-run nonlinearities are introduced via positive and negative partial sum decompositions of the explanatory variable(s). The results suggest evidence of asymmetries in all the cases. We find significant positive oil price changes in all the cases with the expected positive sign, implying that increases in oil price lead to increases in real GDP. Conversely, negative oil price changes are significant for only Kuwait and Qatar with the expected positive sign, suggesting that decreases in oil price lead to decreases in their real GDP. Further analysis implemented using panel data shows that positive oil prices changes increase real GDP and negative changes decrease real GDP. Overall, the results suggest that positive oil price changes have a considerably larger impact on real GDP than negative changes. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.