Algeria's oil-price collapse and the civil-conflict-era economic contraction

Algeria's economy has been structured by hydrocarbon export earnings since independence, and the 1986 collapse in global oil prices, which fell from around 28 dollars a barrel to roughly 10, cut hydrocarbon revenue sharply within a year and exposed how closely growth and import capacity tracked a single volatile commodity. The resulting fiscal and balance-of-payments strain fed directly into the October 1988 riots and the political opening that followed, and by 1990 a new money and credit law gave the Bank of Algeria formal responsibility for monetary policy and bank oversight for the first time. Civil conflict erupted in 1992 and persisted through the decade, compounding the oil shock with capital flight, a collapse in non-hydrocarbon investment, and a currency that lost much of its value against the dollar. Algeria turned to the IMF for standby arrangements in 1989 and 1991 and entered a formal Structural Adjustment Program from 1994 to 1998, during which the dinar was devalued repeatedly and subsidies were cut, stabilizing prices, though the program's deeper restructuring away from oil dependence was never completed.