Abstract
When appraising investment projects from a public perspective, a barrel of oil displaced from or added to domestic consumption has to be valued at its opportunity cost. This paper develops a partial-equilibrium framework to assess the opportunity cost of domestic oil consumption for an oil-exporting country. The framework takes into account that (i) the usual ‘small economy’ assumption does not necessarily hold, (ii) the domestic oil price can be set either at a fixed level or as a function of the international price, and (iii) oil production, level of exports, or domestic consumption can be constrained. We derive the opportunity cost for each case considered and a formula quantifying the net welfare gains from reforming the domestic oil price
