Introduction
There has been a veritable spate of commercial oil and gas discoveries since the 2000s. In its 2016 Global Economic Prospects report, the World Bank had indicated that over recent years there have been signs of this flagging among developing countries. This circumstance has raised concerns, as delays in oil projects are always problematic for these countries. Such delays increase their vulnerabilities at the policy level, chiefly because developing countries build optimistic investment expectations of boosting growth from oil and