Fluctuations in global petroleum prices can explain part of the variation in political violence in three African petrol states: Angola, Nigeria, and Algeria. As petrol states, all these countries have depended on imports of food and other basic commodities purchased with oil export receipts. Thus, when petrol prices and the economic performance of these countries fall, the states decrease impor...

Living close to a petrol station or car repair workshop might be a risk factor for acute childhood leukaemia, French researchers report.

Contamination of soil / water resources by petroleum products poses severe threats to underground water and soil quality. In the present study biosurfactant producing bacterial cultures were used to degrade petrol engine oil under in situ conditions in the plant rhizosphere system. Two bacterial isolates used in this study were recovered from Haldia oil refinery sites and identified as Pseudomo...

This paper evaluates the impact that investigation and regulation of the UK petrol industry has had on the profitability of the companies. Using a gross margin for petrol, we estimate a series of variable parameter autoregressive processes. The results demonstrate that the 1979 Monopolies and Mergers Commission investigation into the industry, caused a long-term decline in profit margins in the...

We explore a methodological improvement to the standard dynamic demand model for petrol–a general model which allows for slowly evolving, unobservable habits. If this habit formation model is correct, then standard estimation techniques produce inconsistent estimates. We find price elasticities of -0.13 (short-run) and -0.20 (long-run). Importantly, standard techniques are misleading about the ...

A hybrid-spatial interaction model (SIM) was presented in Heppenstall et al. (2005). Despite producing promising results, the model was limited by the assumption that consumers would only buy petrol from the wards that they lived in. Research undertaken by Ning and Haining (2003) showed that the majority of consumers purchased petrol on their way to work or on shopping trips. A network model is...