Over the years, the East-West Center (EWC) has developed considerable expertise in refinery modeling, especially in the area of forecasting product balances for countries, given planned capacity changes, changes in product demand, changes in crude slates, and changes in product specifications....

Since the mid-1990s, the two regional trade agreements in South America, the southern Mercosur Pact (among Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay), and the northern Andean Pact (among Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru) noticeably affected certain trade patterns between the two...

During the last decade, the Venezuelan government has pursued a reform of the legal regime of hydrocarbons tailored to its interests as an oil producing country. However, the ongoing consequences of the global economic recession which negatively impacted the Venezuelan economy, call into...

Econometric Modeling has a wide range if applications, including economy-wide representations. This study takes on the task of finding a suitable structure to model the Venezuelan economy. It is revealed that econometric structural and computable general equilibrium models are inapplicable,...

Nationalization is a particular type of organizational structure where the state or nation controlsthe industry as opposed to private companies or multinational organizations. If one imagines acontinuum of organizational structure, nationalization and privatization would be at oppositeends....

This article explores the history of oil exploration in colonial Nigerian between c.1903 and 1958 when the first shipment of Nigerian crude oil arrived in Rotterdam. It debunks the two most persistent myths in Nigerian oil historiography namely that oil exploration dates back to 1908 when the...

"Government resource decisions in the Arctic typically involve complex issues; multiple criteria are used to choose among alternatives. This complexity is even greater with petroleum development because of concerns about national energy security, environmental impacts, and economic development....

This paper develops a framework that analyzes how mergers and acquisitions in Alberta’s oil and gas industry affect stock prices. In this experiment, a multivariate regression is applied to several industry-specific variables to determine if they have impacts on the abnormal stock returns of...

In Mexico the possibility of producing biofuels has generated a wide range of political, economical and technical comments and opinions. This is due mainly to the fact that the oil industry has contributed heavily to the direct financing of the Mexican government for the last 70 years, in 2007...

This is a study about the growth of oil industry and its economic and political repercussions in Brazil. It combines an industrial analysis with an empirical assessment of the impact of oil royalties on municipal fiscal transparency in Brazil.This paper begins with an overview of the future of...