It is hard to think of any business that is more international than oil. Yet in one sense, for a decade, its operations have been less international than they had been for many years, since long before the slowdown in growth began. Throughout the eighties, less than half of the oil that the world used was supplied through interregional trade. That had not happened since the early sixties. Very few people close to this business had expected this situation ever to recur. In 1973, 60 per cent of world oil consumption had moved in trade between regions. In 1990, even after the belated upturn, that trade was still less than 49 per cent of consumption (Figure 2.1). Counting in intra-trade within regions, oil movement across national frontiers probably did still supply nearly 60 per cent of world consumption at the end of the eighties. But in 1973, by that same measure, it had been as high as 84 per cent (Table 2.1).

Indeed, international trade was what slowed down most in the oil business after the early seventies. It stopped growing earlier than world production or consumption; it fell much more sharply in the early eighties; and up to the early nineties it had still not fully recovered. From 1979 to the mid-eighties, world oil consumption dropped 10 per cent and production 14 per cent. By the measure most widely used in this business – the volume of oil movement between the main regions of the world – the decline in trade between 1979 and 1985 was nearly a third.