Call it the Saudi calculus.

Oil prices were already plummeting 14 months ago when, at Saudi Arabia’s insistence, OPEC put the global petroleum industry on notice: The member countries would not try to prop up prices by cutting production.

“We don’t want to panic,” Abdalla el-Badri, secretary general of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, told reporters at the group’s November 2014 meeting in Vienna. “We want to see how the market behaves.”

Since then, the market has behaved in a way few could have predicted — including Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter. The price of oil has collapsed under the weight of a growing international glut, made worse by slower growth in the global economy.

And yet the Saudis keep pumping oil at virtually full capacity. And they have persuaded their Persian Gulf OPEC allies — Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar — to do the same, despite mounting pressure from other big OPEC members to curtail production.