The Hijack-Political Responses

mands. Japan is even more vulnerable. On the other hand, the producer nations will be losing large revenues if the oil embargo is undertaken. Development programmes will be sorely affected but the day-to-day economic life of the oil producing countries, which is still at a very basic and unsophisticated level, parts of it even outside the money economy, will be able to carry on. The much more complex economic and social structures of highly industrialised societies are much more vulnerable to the snow-balling effect created by the shortage of a key commodity like oil.