More complicated than my rant27 Nov 2014 12:11
of course...OPEC is immune from cartel law so I guess US would be immune as well
..and OPEC may not be a cartel at all (despite me and others thinking it is lol)
cf
"The first step is to investigate whether OPEC actually acts as a cartel.
and changes in its price are
commonly believed to have powerful economic and political consequences. Moreover,
OPEC represents an intriguing test case for theories of international cooperation: like the
WTO but unlike human rights treaties, there is a direct material reward for collective action
in OPEC’s case, so we might expect deep cooperation. Popular wisdom also holds that OPEC
is influential, but economic studies investigating OPEC’s market impact have had difficulty
finding conclusive evidence. This generates two questions. First, does OPEC operate as a
cartel, meaning that it significantly restricts its members’ oil production in order to affect
prices? Second, if OPEC is not actually a cartel, why do so many people believe that it is?
5
Using some of the
same tests used to evaluate the impact of the WTO and other organizations, I find that OPEC
rarely if ever constrains or influences the oil production rate of its member states. This
paper is not the first to question OPEC’s effectiveness in restricting the oil supply.
6
1 Rose 2004, 2007; Goldstein et al., 2007
However, there is sufficient ambiguity and debate to sustain OPEC’s image, even among
scholars, as a cartel that manipulates the price of oil by restricting supply. Therefore I
conduct four empirical tests in search of OPEC’s effect on oil production, at least two of
which are entirely novel. I show that OPEC membership is not significantly correlated with
lower oil production once other relevant factors are controlled for. I make no claim about
whether OPEC could restrict oil supply in principle; I simply argue that it does not do so in
practice. ..."
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