Nigeria’s transformation from a predominantly agricultural to an oil economy has had many significant social and economic effects. In this paper, an attempt is made to analyse one of such effects: the impact on the country’s balance of payments.

One of the more unhappy effects of the recent, massive rise in the price of crude oil has been its impact on those developing countries not fortunate enough to be oil exporters themselves. The authors offer a proposal for rechanneling some of the oil revenues to the impacted developing countries.

From 18-25 March the United Nations’ “International Meeting on Petroleum Geology” will take place in China, a country whose oil reserves up to the mid-sixties had been judged by foreign observers to be minute and the development of her oil sector of no major importance. Today, with an...