46 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Canada, Australia and New Zealand—who were keen on reducing their dependence on oil imports, readily provided the requisite backing—financial, legislative and fiscal. Further, the inflationary aftermath of 1973 generated massive funds of liquid capital, which, together with recycled petro-dollars, provided abundant credit to the energy companies: energy was and continues to be the triple-A investment. Underdeveloped countries, desperately trying to reduce the burden of oil imports, also embarked upon programmes to raise their oil potential. Most of these countries who lacked the requisite industrial/technical base welcomed the oil MNCs, while a few, notably Mexico and India, embarked on their own exploration and development programmes through their state-owned companies. As a consequence, three new major oil provinces were brought into production, namely, the North Sea, the Alaskan Slope and the Mexican off-shore. The output from these areas, together with enhanced production from older fields outside OPEC and new production from a host of newly-developed fields, greatly raised the level of non-OPEC production. Although a portion of the production from these fields was not traded internationally (e. g., Bombay High), to the extent that it repkced OPEC exports, it contributed towards the reduction of OPEC's share of the capitalist world's* oil consumption. Further, since production from all the major new oil producing areas—including US domestic production, following Reagan's partial decontrol of oil and gas prices—was in some manner or the other tied to the price of OPEC crude, the hitter's price hikes had a much larger impact on the average price of oil consumed in the capitalist world than the declining share of OPEC's production warranted. The continually rising prices of oil caused a slowdown in the rate of growth of consumption in the principal consuming regions— Western Europe, Japan and North America. A combination of improved efficiency in oil-burning processes, a certain amount of switching over to coal (most marked in the case of the cement industry) and reduced consumption levels at the household level, put a halt to the exponentially rising levels of energy consumption, particularly of oil, which characterised the pre-1973 period. This was most evident in Western Europe—the most hard-hit. Estimates by the International Energy Agency (established by some OECD countries) put West Europe's oil consumption at 13 million barrels per day in 1980, lower lhan the 1979 level of 15 million barrels per day (equivalent to the consumption level in 1973). A similar tendency, if of somewhat lower severity, is evident in other industrialised countries also. What made the OPEC escalations more unbearable was the simultaneous strengthening of the US dollar. Since OPEC's prices are expressed in US dollars, in 1981, while OPEC's official prices did not change, nonetheless, the roughly 20 per cent rise in the US dollar