Energy Archive

For the first time, Saudi Arabia’s budget this year includes measures to gradually reduce subsidies on gasoline and other fuel, in response to declining oil revenue from the slump in global energy prices. The move, replicated in other Arab Gulf states, represents a fundamental challenge to the assumptions on which the region’s economy and political structure are based. Since the beginning of the year, millions of Saudis have found it more expensive to drive to and from work each day. To people living outside the Gulf, the burden may not seem onerous. The cost at the pumps of higher-grade gasoline […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the impact of falling oil and commodities prices on resource-exporting countries. As a commodities-exporting country deeply linked to the Chinese market, Mongolia faces heightened risks from the current commodities slump and China’s economic slowdown. In an email interview, Jonathan Berkshire Miller, director of the Council on International Policy, discusses the impact of the commodities slump on Mongolia. WPR: How important are commodities for Mongolia’s economy, and what effect have falling commodities prices had on public spending and, by consequence, political stability? Jonathan Berkshire Miller: Commodities, and their prices, […]

Assessments of the largest emerging economies—China, India and Brazil—and their global influence have been as volatile as each of their stock markets. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the buoyancy of their economies supported both a global recovery and their status as the rising powers of the 21st century. Now, the boom decade after 2001 seems a distant memory. As China’s economy slows from supercharged to respectable growth and rebalancing curbs its demand for commodities, growth in commodity-producing countries, Brazil among them, has slumped. Even India, which surpassed China’s growth rate for the first time in 2015, […]