La baisse du prix du pétrole : quelles perspectives pour l'OPEP et quelles retombées pour le Tiers Monde ?

Abstract

Twelve years after the first oil shock, the fall in oil price appears as a logical consequence of the sharp mutations that occured in the international oil market since the begining of the 80's. The reduction of demand for OPEC oil was in a paradoxical way evicting producers with main oil reserves and lower production costs from the market. Saudi Arabia and its allies of the Gulf put an end to this absurd situation by launching a war price in december 1985. By boosting oil demand in OECD countries and reducing non OPEC oil production, the drop in oil price might give the Golf producers a new control of the market, the effects of which would appear at the begining of next decade. This new strategy, hardly accepted by the other members of the organization, doesn't serve the interest of the third world taken as a whole. Areas mostly hurt by the crisis since 1980 — Africa and Latin America — are, even excluding OPEC countries, oil net exporters. Globally, non OPEC LDC's were oil autosufficient in 1985. For highly indebted oil exporting countries, the losses in oil export receipts will be hardly balanced by the expected decrease in international interest rate. The increase in OECD economic growth rate due to the sharp improvement in the industrial countries terms of trade will benefit mainly to the New Industrialized Countries. Those few countries, which depend strongly on oil imports, will take the greatest advantage from the redistribution of import capacity between LDC's. This will reinforce the heterogeneity of the Third World. This new conjoncture could be destabilizing for the international credit system. The decrease in external assests of OPEC countries, which had been feeding the growing LDC's debt during the 70's, affects the bank's loan capacity while loan demand from most highly indebted countries tends to increase. Under such conditions, financial proposals of the Baker plan seem quite insufficient.