Some forecasters recently have predicted that OPEC countries with continuing current account surpluses will shift from long-term to short-term investments in the near future to improve their liquidity positions. However, careful study of a variety of data, including historical patterns, suggests...

The collapse if OPEC has been prophesied repeatedly since it was first founded in Baghdad in September 1960. Yet in spite of all their differences its members, which now number 13 countries, have so far always managed to establish at least a formal bare minimum of consensus. It may be that...

For a time in the mid-1970s, “Third World solidarity” was at its zenith and the prospect of a new international economic order appeared to be within reach. But by the Cancun Summit in 1981 the schism between the oil exporting developing countries and the non-oil exporting developing...