Rethinking the Resource Curse

Rethinking the Resource Curse
Author: Benjamin Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2021-04-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108788033

This Element documents the diversity and dissensus of scholarship on the political resource curse, diagnoses its sources, and directs scholarly attention towards what the authors believe will be more fruitful avenues of future research. In the scholarship to date, there is substantial regional heterogeneity and substantial evidence denying the existence of a political resource curse. This dissensus is located in theory, measure, and research design, especially regarding measurement error and endogenous selection. The work then turns to strategies for reconnecting research on resource politics to the broader literature on democratic development. Finally, the results of the authors' own research is presented, showing that a set of historically contingent events in the Middle East and North Africa are at the root of what has been mistaken for a global political resource curse.

The Institutions Curse

The Institutions Curse
Author: Victor Menaldo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2016-08-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107138604

Debunks the view that natural resources lead to terrible outcomes by demonstrating that oil and minerals are actually a blessing.

Oil Is Not a Curse

Oil Is Not a Curse
Author: Pauline Jones Luong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2010-08-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139491156

This book makes two central claims: first, that mineral-rich states are cursed not by their wealth but, rather, by the ownership structure they choose to manage their mineral wealth and second, that weak institutions are not inevitable in mineral-rich states. Each represents a significant departure from the conventional resource curse literature, which has treated ownership structure as a constant across time and space and has presumed that mineral-rich countries are incapable of either building or sustaining strong institutions - particularly fiscal regimes. The experience of the five petroleum-rich Soviet successor states (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) provides a clear challenge to both of these assumptions. Their respective developmental trajectories since independence demonstrate not only that ownership structure can vary even across countries that share the same institutional legacy but also that this variation helps to explain the divergence in their subsequent fiscal regimes.

Rethinking the Resource Curse

Rethinking the Resource Curse
Author: Pauline Jones Luong
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008
Genre:
ISBN:

Most political scientists and economists unequivocally accept the proposition that abundant mineral resources are more often a curse than a blessing, particularly for developing countries. We argue that the widely accepted contention that an abundance of mineral resources and the influx of external rents generated from these resources during boom periods are to blame for the so-called "resource curse" should be revisited. Instead, we offer a new research agenda for studying the problem of resource-rich states that shifts the locus of study away from the "paradox of plenty" to a more appropriate paradox - that the concentration of wealth impoverishes the state whereas the dispersion of wealth enriches the state. This agenda focuses on three interrelated issues: the structure of ownership over mineral resources, the importance of strong institutions, and the relative influence of domestic versus international factors.

The Oxford Handbook of the Politics of Development

The Oxford Handbook of the Politics of Development
Author: Carol Lancaster
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 753
Release: 2018
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199845158

Modernization theory : does economic development cause democratization? / Jose Antonio Cheibub and James Raymond Vreeland -- Dependency theory / James Mahoney and Diana Rodriguez-Franco -- Structuralism / Elliott Green -- Political development / Robert H. Bates -- The Washington Consensus and the new political economy of economic reform / Kevin Morrison -- Penury traps and prosperity tales : why some countries escape poverty while others do not / M. Steven Fish -- Culture, politics and development / Michael Woolcock -- Religion, politics and economic development : synergies and disconnects / Katherine Marshall -- Does inequality harm economic development and democracy? : accounting for missing values, noncomparable observations, and endogeneity / Christian Houle -- Ethnicity and development / Nic Cheeseman -- Civil conflict and development / Håvard Hegre -- The politics of the resource curse : a review / Michael L. Ross -- Taxation and development / Mick Moore -- How do governments build capabilities to do great things? : ten cases, two competing explanations, one large research agenda / Matt Andrews -- Leadership and the politics of development / Adrian Leftwich and Heather Lyne De Ver -- Colonialism and development in africa / Leander Heldring and James A. Robinson -- Investment and debt / Layna Mosley -- The role of the state in harnessing trade-and-investment for development purposes / Theodore H. Moran -- International financial institutions and market liberalization in the developing world / Stephen C. Nelson -- Foreign aid and democratization in developing countries / Danielle Resnick -- Organizing for prosperity : collective action, political parties, and the political economy of development / Philip Keefer -- Missing links in the institutional chain / Anirudh Krishna -- The comparative politics of service delivery in developing countries / Evan S. Lieberman -- Party systems and the politics of development / Allen Hicken -- Populism and political representation / Kenneth M. Roberts -- Africa's political economy in the contemporary era / Peter M. Lewis -- The politics of development in Latin America and East Asia / James W. McGuire -- Development and underdevelopment in the Middle East and North Africa / Melani Cammett -- Rethinking the institutional foundations of china's hypergrowth : official incentives, institutional constraints, and local developmentalism / Fubing Su, Ran Tao, and Dali L. Yang -- The politics of growth in South Korea : miracle, crisis, and the new market economy / Stephan Haggard and Myung-Koo Kang

From Windfall to Curse?

From Windfall to Curse?
Author: Jonathan Di John
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2015-12-21
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0271076909

Since the discovery of abundant oil resources in the 1920s, Venezuela has had an economically privileged position among the nations of Latin America, which has led to its being treated by economic and political analysts as an exceptional case. In her well-known study of Venezuela’s political economy, The Paradox of Plenty (1997), Stanford political scientist Terry Karl argued that this oil wealth induced extraordinary corruption, rent-seeking, and centralized intervention that resulted in restricting productivity and growth. What this and other studies of Venezuela’s economy fail to explain, however, is how such conditions have accompanied both growth and stagnation at different periods of Venezuela’s history and why countries experiencing similar levels of corruption and rent-seeking produce divergent developmental outcomes. By investigating the record of economic development in Venezuela from 1920 to the present, Jonathan Di John shows that the key to explaining why the economy performed much better between 1920 and 1980 than in the post-1980 period is to understand how political strategies interacted with economic strategies—specifically, how politics determined state capacity at any given time and how the stage of development and development strategies affected the nature of political conflicts. In emphasizing the importance of an approach that looks at the political economy, not just at the economy alone, Di John advances the field methodologically while he contributes to a long-needed history of Venezuela’s economic performance in the twentieth century.

Escaping the Resource Curse

Escaping the Resource Curse
Author: Macartan Humphreys
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2007-05-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0231512104

The wealth derived from natural resources can have a tremendous impact on the economics and politics of producing countries. In the last quarter century, we have seen the surprising and sobering consequences of this wealth, producing what is now known as the "resource curse." Countries with large endowments of natural resources, such as oil and gas, often do worse than their poorer neighbors. Their resource wealth frequently leads to lower growth rates, greater volatility, more corruption, and, in extreme cases, devastating civil wars. In this volume, leading economists, lawyers, and political scientists address the fundamental channels generated by this wealth and examine the major decisions a country must make when faced with an abundance of a natural resource. They identify such problems as asymmetric bargaining power, limited access to information, the failure to engage in long-term planning, weak institutional structures, and missing mechanisms of accountability. They also provide a series of solutions, including recommendations for contracting with oil companies and allocating revenue; guidelines for negotiators; models for optimal auctions; and strategies to strengthen state-society linkages and public accountability. The contributors show that solutions to the resource curse do exist; yet, institutional innovations are necessary to align the incentives of key domestic and international actors, and this requires fundamental political changes and much greater levels of transparency than currently exist. It is becoming increasingly clear that past policies have not provided the benefits they promised. Escaping the Resource Curse lays out a path for radically improving the management of the world's natural resources.

Jihad in the City

Jihad in the City
Author: Raphaël Lefèvre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2021-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108596444

Tawhid was a militant Islamist group which implemented Islamic law at gunpoint in the Lebanese city of Tripoli during the 1980s. In retrospect, some have called it 'the first ISIS-style Emirate'. Drawing on two hundred interviews with Islamist fighters and their mortal enemies, as well as on a trove of new archival material, Raphaël Lefèvre provides a comprehensive account of this Islamist group. He shows how they featured religious ideologues determined to turn Lebanon into an Islamic Republic, yet also included Tripolitan rebels of all stripes, neighbourhood strongmen with scores to settle, local subalterns seeking social revenge as well as profit-driven gangsters, who each tried to steer Tawhid's exercise of violence to their advantage. Providing a detailed understanding of the multi-faceted processes through which Tawhid emerged in 1982, implemented its 'Emirate' and suddenly collapsed in 1985, this is a story that shows how militant Islamist groups are impacted by their grand ideology as much as by local contexts – with crucial lessons for understanding social movements, rebel groups and terrorist organizations elsewhere too.