Founded in 1960, as a means of enabling the member countries to gain control of their petroleum resources from the
multinational oil companies based in the developed countries, OPEC achieved some dramatic successes during the 1973 1982 time period (Paxton, 1983, pp. 22-41). When demand for crude petroleum began to slacken concurrently with the onset of the economic recession in the developed countries, however, many of the OPEC countries were ill prepared to withstand the decline in current income.
Quite simply, the collapse of world crude oil prices and crude oil demand placed in jeopardy both the domestic agendas of the OPEC member countries. The governments of the countries were under enormous pressures to satisfy the demands of their populations, on the one hand, while, on the other hand, the countries' earnings from crude oil sales were, under changed circumstances, insufficient to cover the cost of satisfying these demands.
When all was said and done, the OPEC physical resource cartel had not alt
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