Abstract
The American oil industry is shifting the bulk of its new investment overseas in the hopes that there will be greater profits there than in the U.S. This is not likely to be the panacea that senior managers in the oil industry hope it Mill be. This is primarily because the American oil industry is lagging in its competitiveness with the leading industry participants from other countries. In the past twenty years, the dominance of the U.S. oil industry in most fields has been steadily eroded to the point where it no longer has the unquestioned competitive edge. Just the contrary, in many parts of the world, the U.S. oil industry is competitively a Iagger.
The uncompetitive position of the U.S. companies is due to four chief constraints: the constraints of a transformed, unattractive international investment environment; structural constraints which shape the way the American industry operates; managerial constraints which afflict most companies at the level of individuals; and cultural constraints which are generally true to all American companies. This paper aims to diagnose the causes of the American decline in competitiveness and the scope of the challenges facing the American industry as it goes international.
