Strategies for foreign investment in Iran's upstream oil industry with an emphasis on Production Sharing Contracts

Investment is an important issue in the exploitation of oil fields. Since the oil fields are typically in undeveloped countries, lack of necessary capital causes increasing and numerous problems for such countries. Fundraising arrangements are an opportunity to recruit investment from overseas. Due to increased competition in attracting foreign investment and the investee countries’ interest to participate in Production Sharing Contracts (PSC), in this paper descriptive and analytical methods are used. After investigating attracting foreign investment PSC methods and referring to the traditional sources of oil law, the results show that weakness of ownership system and the level of state control over its resources are main reasons for investee countries to accept PSCs.