Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Petrocurrency
Summary
Petrocurrency (or petrodollar) is a word used with three distinct meanings, often confused:
Dollars paid to oil-producing nations (petrodollar recycling)—a term invented in the 1970s meaning trading surpluses of oil-producing nations.
Currencies of oil-producing nations which tend to rise in value against other currencies when the price of oil rises (and fall when it falls).
Pricing of oil in US dollars: currencies used as a unit of account to price oil in the international market.
Petrodollar recycling
"Petrocurrency" or (more commonly) "petrodollars" are popular shorthand for revenues from petroleum exports, mainly from the OPEC members plus Russia and Norway. Especially during periods of historically expensive oil, the associated financial flows can reach a scale of hundreds of billions of US dollar-equivalents per year – including a wide range of transactions in a variety of currencies, some pegged to the US dollar and some not.
The pound sterling has sometimes been regarded as a petrocurrency as a result of North Sea oil exports.
The Dutch guilder was once regarded as a petrocurrency due to its large quantities of natural gas and North Sea oil exports. The Dutch Guilder strengthened greatly in the 1970s, after OPEC began a series of price hikes throughout the decade that consequently increased the value of all oil-producing nations' currencies. However, as a result of the appreciation of the Guilder, industrial manufacturing and services in the Netherlands during the 1970s and into the 1980s were crowded out of the larger national economy, and the country became increasingly non-competitive on world markets due to the high cost of Dutch industrial and service exports. This phenomenon is often referred to in economics literature as Dutch disease.
The Canadian dollar is sometimes viewed as a petrocurrency, but this status is controversial. In theory, as the price of oil rises, oil-related export revenues rise for an oil exporting nation, and thus constitute a larger monetary component of exports.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.