ABSTRACT
Oil price changes can be measured much less ambiguously than, say, monetary aggregates, and their economic impact lends itself to misleadingly simple quantification. Of all the oil-exporting countries, Mexico provides the most telling example of the ambivalence of oil and of its potential to wreak havoc on an economy even before the bonanza is over. The case of Mexico is probably the best illustration of the need to take a broad view of the impact of oil prices. Government oil revenues in Nigeria declined from $23.4 billion in 19S0 to $16.7 billion in 1981, when, despite requests from some companies, it refused to cut oil prices by $5. The London Agreement on production and prices implied a reduction of $3 billion in Venezuelan oil export revenue in 1983, from $15 billion in 1982. Iraq has problems caused by the combination of the war and the downturn in the oil market.
