ABSTRACT
The nub of the dispute, of course, is not in a disagreement about whether the crises did or did not have negative economic consequences for the African non-oil-producing countries but in questions about the sorts of consequences, how much weight to assign to the oil crisis, and the extent of Arab obligations to those affected. The Arab position is that their obligations are limited because the damage was not of their doing, was limited in any case, and because they were not responsible for the Africans' overblown expectations of Arab compensation. If there is consensus on the general situation, there is much less agreement on the details, both with respect to the several factors involved and upon their specific impact on particular African economies. The thirty-eight-country "less developed" subsample was obtained by excluding states with less than one million in population or $100 million GNP, or for which data were unreliable, and it included all the African states they used.
