English Summary

This paper sets out to quantify the key factors that set apart national oil companies (NOCs) from large oil exporting countries from private oil companies, in terms of resource endowment, production economics and revenue generation capability. It goes on to identify what are the relevant criteria for assessing the performance of NOCs: fiscal or entrepreneurial. It concludes that private oil companies cannot compete with NOCs in generating tax revenues for large oil exporting countries. Although the slack in operations of many NOCs is very high, noticeable improvements are possible ...