In other words, what is the dollar amount per barrel that would be required for an oil-producing country to balance its fiscal budget?

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But Renard, 42, believes the oil-producing country can reproduce the form that saw them rub shoulders with the world's elite at the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany.

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Global spare capacity has vanished so much that almost any oil-producing country, not just top producers such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, can cause a price spike by withholding access to its resources, BCA says.

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But as any oil-producing developing country can attest, such profits can create problems as well as solve them.

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Past Nigerian governments allowed the country's oil-producing states to keep only a tiny share of the cash they generated, but the current president, Olusegun Obasanjo, has promised to make amends.

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If Texas were a stand-alone country, it would today rank as the 14th largest oil producing nation and 3rd largest natural gas producing nation on the face of the earth.

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The country's main supply route, a railway connecting Brazzaville and Pointe Noire, the oil-producing town, has been disrupted for the past seven months.

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But only now, a full year after civilian rule returned to Nigeria, is there a plan to earmark some of the earnings from the 2m barrels a day that the country currently exports, and use it to improve the lives of the people living in the oil-producing areas.

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