ABSTRACT
Two years after the hectic reactions to the first successful application of the oil weapon, the sense of emergency of the energy crisis has widely been replaced by complacency. A cursory glance might seem to justify this complacency: a world-wide recession and unusually mild winters have brought down oil consumption in the industrialized countries and forced the oil producers to reduce their production (and some of them even to lower the price of oil). Besides, the freezing of official oil price levels until September 1975 has meant an effective erosion of the purchasing power of producers’ oil revenues, as a consequence of inflationary rises in the cost of imports from the consumer countries.
