Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

Our approach to the challenging task set by this paper is to separate the four major industrial sectors-oil, gas, refining and petrochemicals, and analyse each separately.

Two different methodologies are employed: for the oil sector, a (conventionally-structured) computer model is developed, which forecasts sustainable oil production capacity increases, and their anticipated cost, on a country by country basis in the Arab region through to year 2000.

For the gas, refining and petrochemicals sectors a "database" methodology has been developed: major expected investments in each sector in the Arab world to the end of the dacade are listed in the relevant database. An "expected value" estimate of actual expenditure is then constructed out of a probability analysis of the contents of each database.

The investment estimates for oil, gas, refining and petrochemicals are combined in the Financing and Conclusions section of the paper. A projected total investment for all sector is derived, a figure approaching 100 billion $, for the base case scenario envisaged by the paper. The funding of this forecast expenditure is also discussed in this section.