“The last time they were in a parallel situation, with oil prices plummeting in the 1980s, you had all these proclamations that OPEC was dead,” said Benn Steil , also at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he’s director of international economics. “Yet they weren’t, because when the fundamental forces of the business settled at a higher level of oil prices, they started to regain some relevance.” You can read the World Bank study, which was authored by John Baffes, Ayhan Kose, Franziska Ohnsorge and Marc Stocker, here .