Doug: Crude soared today despite that API report. Wish I could say the same for the OSX. Tomorrow perhaps?
IMF again restates the obvious:
Wednesday September 30, 3:38 pm Eastern Time
Low oil prices hurt Mideast, African nations'
budgets, IMF says
WASHINGTON, Sept 30 (Reuters) - Oil-exporting nations in the Middle East and
Africa will face ''difficult budgetary decisions'' if world oil prices remain low, the
International Monetary Fund said Wednesday.
Some of the richest oil nations in the Persian Gulf may be able to attract capital to
offset the decline in world oil prices, the IMF said in its latest analysis of the world
economic outlook.
''However, if oil prices do not rebound strongly, even those countries will need to undertake revenue-raising and
expenditure-reducing measures to ensure medium-term external and fiscal sustainability,'' the IMF report said.
Nine of 14 developing countries in the Middle East and four African nations rely on oil exports for more than half of their export
earnings.
Oman, for example, faces a 10 percent drop in fiscal receipts in 1998, while Kuwait will see a decline of 8.5 percent and Saudi
Arabia a drop of 7.9 percent, according to the IMF.
World oil prices fell from an average of about $18 per barrel at the beginning of 1997 to as low as $12 per barrel in recent weeks.
The slump in world oil prices is good news for oil-importing nations but even some of those may suffer because of the impact of
price declines on neighboring oil exporters, the IMF said.
Other commodity-dependent African nations have also seen export earnings fall sharply during the past year, sometimes more
deeply than oil prices.
A 27 percent decline in copper prices is having a ''serious impact'' on Zambia and a lesser impact on the Republic of Congo, the
IMF report said.
The loss of export earnings from exports of the main non-oil commodities in 1998 ''is expected to exceed the gain from lower
prices for petroleum imports'' for 10 of the 13 African oil-importing countries, the report said.
But overall, the current growth rate and inflation rate projections for African oil-importing countries are about the same as last
year, the IMF said. |
