ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the remaining group of countries in the world of the international oil industry. This group consists of those countries which have interests in common arising from their underdevelopment and low living standards and which are dependent nations in the economic system of the non-communist world. Often an underdeveloped country’s participation in this system is only marginal, consisting of little more than the export of one primary commodity or another to the industrialized countries in return for which foreign manufactured goods are imported for use by the minority of the population of the country able to buy such things. At the same time many, or even most, of the people of such countries pursue their own subsistence or largely subsistence ways of life and, in the light of their very rudimentary wants, are virtually unaffected by such external trading relationships. There are a very large number of such countries – well over 100 in Africa, Latin America and South East Asia – and their general economic and social problems have been investigated in much post-war literature. Our particular concern with them in this book is as consumers and potentially much larger consumers of oil, and in this respect one has first to note that almost all of them use oil as the most important source of energy in the modern sectors of their economies. It should be borne in mind, however, that in most such countries the ‘energy’ that is collected or gathered within the framework of a subsistence way of life remains more – and often much more – important than all purchases of all types of ‘commercial’ energy put together. The dominance of oil in their commercial energy systems is illustrated in Map 9 (p. 162). The dominance of oil so early in the development process differentiates them from the industrialized nations where, as we have seen in earlier chapters, coal was in most cases the main source of energy which sustained economic growth. The switch away from coal to oil occurred in quite recent years and, since 1973, the process has, in part, been reversed. A switch to coal is not an option which is open to most of the developing countries in the short-term so that their economies have been made more precarious than those of any other group of countries in the world as a result of the twelvefold real increase in oil prices since 1970. Dependence on oil in the developing world. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203366257/9a30bc54-6585-4e48-bea7-8420ee10ae76/content/map9_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
