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Oil Wealth and the Poverty of Politics: Algeria Compared. By Miriam R. Lowi. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 252p. $94.00, cloth, $31.99 paper.
- Pauline Jones Luong
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- Perspectives on Politics / Volume 11 / Issue 2 / June 2013
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- 21 May 2013, pp. 596-598
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Although Miriam R. Lowi's primary goal is to explain “the enigma of Algeria” (p. 16), her analysis extends far beyond this individual country to shed light on questions that are of broad interest to students of comparative politics. Indeed, as is indicative of all so-called single-country case studies, her in-depth investigation of Algeria's postindependence trajectory—from its “unfulfilled expectations” in the 1980s to its “descent into violence” in the 1990s and then “the [state's] resurgence” in the 2000s (p. 7)—is at the outset an attempt to explain a larger class of phenomena. Lowi is quite explicit in this regard. In sum, she seeks to “extend [her] argument about Algeria” to explain, first, why oil-rich states experience different kinds of political stability in the face of similar economic shocks, and second, what role, if any, oil wealth has played in fueling these political outcomes (p. 17).
Response to Miriam R. Lowi's review of Oil Is Not a Curse: Ownership Structure and Institutions in Soviet Successor States
- Pauline Jones Luong
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- 21 May 2013, pp. 595-596
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In her gracious and incisive review, Miriam R. Lowi raises three main questions: 1) whether Russia is indeed a case of private domestic ownership (P1); 2) whether there is a fundamental difference between state ownership with control (S1) and without control (S2); and 3) whether we adequately take into account alternative explanations for the variation in ownership structure (OS) across petroleum-rich states over the twentieth century.
Figures
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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Appendix D - Ranking Basis for Determining which Countries are Included in Our Database
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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4 - Two Versions of Rentierism
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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I’m becoming more and more convinced in the correctness of my decision to provide the population with such an inordinate degree of social protection, as its implementation has allowed every Turkmen to receive practically every day a guaranteed share of our national wealth, every hour to feel the support of the state. …
– Saparmurat Niyazov, President of Turkmenistan, explaining his decision to give free gas, electricity, and water to the populationUntil recently, we were forced to import virtually all important oil products, mainly from Russia. But a lot has been done towards achieving energy self-sufficiency in the last two or three years … . [Now we can reduce the amount of] cotton we sell to buy these products. We will sell cotton instead to satisfy people’s needs; we will buy foodstuffs and consumer goods, build new factories and facilities.
– Islam Karimov, President of Uzbekistan, September 1994Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan stand alone among the petroleum-rich Soviet successor states in their decision to retain the ownership structure that they inherited from the Soviet Union – that is, state ownership with control (S1), and thus to eschew direct foreign involvement. By 1992 – just one year after declaring their independence – the newly elected presidents of both countries had publicly asserted that both petroleum resources and the right to develop them belonged solely to the state and began restructuring their respective oil and gas industries to reflect the “transfer” of property from the Soviet state to their own nations. Alongside newly empowered oil and gas ministries, therefore, emerged fully state-owned concerns or corporations, such as Turkmengaz, Turkmenneft, and Uzbekneftegaz, to perform the oversight and managerial functions previously usurped by the Soviet government (for details, see IEA 1998). “These new national concerns,” according to von Hirschhausen and Engerer (1998, 1116), “simply inherited almost the entire exploration, production, transmission and some distribution activities, engineering and other elements of their respective republics, not to forget all ‘social assets.’”
For those who emphasized institutional continuity with the Soviet system, S1 may seem the most obvious choice. Indeed, neither country had a significant petroleum industry prior to Soviet rule. Although oil extraction began in both Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, it was rather minimal and mined primarily for kerosene, which was then used in the cotton-processing factories and dairies (Sagers 1994). Yet, considering their mutual need for significant capital investment to build new and upgrade existing infrastructure, the decision to go it alone is not only surprising, it is quite counterintuitive (see Amuzegar 1998). Nor, as others have claimed, was S1 the only choice due to the sheer dearth of interested foreign investors and – particularly in the case of Uzbekistan – the meagerness of estimated reserves. On the contrary, several foreign oil and gas companies were clamoring to buy into both countries’ petroleum sectors immediately after the Soviet Union’s demise. Enron’s representative in Uzbekistan, who arrived in 1994, for example, underscored that this was “the only time that Enron has come into a country without a deal signed first,” justifying this decision with the conviction that “more than half of the country contain[ed] undiscovered and untapped oil and gas reserves” (Authors’ interview). Moreover, although Uzbekistan did not have the same level of proven reserves as either of its Central Asian counterparts, the potential rents from its petroleum sector were believed to be “still higher than Indonesian oil rents during the 1974–78 and 1979–81 oil booms” (Auty 2003, 259). Furthermore, although Uzbekistan’s total potential rents as a percentage of its GDP were about half of both Azerbaijan’s and Turkmenistan’s in 2000, they certainly rivaled Kazakhstan’s (see Table 4.1).
Appendix C - Responses to Select Life in Transition Survey (LiTS) Questions by Age Group
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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Works Cited
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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Index
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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Oil Is Not a Curse
- Ownership Structure and Institutions in Soviet Successor States
- Pauline Jones Luong, Erika Weinthal
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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.
3 - State Ownership with Control versus Private Domestic Ownership
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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Supposing we had oil and gas, do you think I could get the people to do this? No … . If I had oil and gas I’d have a different people, with different motivations and expectations. It’s because we don’t have oil and gas and they know that we don’t have, and they know that this [Singapore’s economic] progress comes from their efforts.
– Lee Kwan Yew, founder and first Prime Minister of Singapore, on why he was able to motivate his citizenry to work hard and expect less from the government (Mydans and Arnold 2007).The [resource curse] problem is exacerbated by the fact that natural resources tend to be controlled by state-run monopolies, which pretty much insures a low level of innovation and competitiveness, and encourages people to look to the state, instead of themselves, for solutions.
– James Surowiecki (2001) on why countries like Saudi Arabia are hooked on oil.The variation in ownership structure over mineral reserves across time and space in the twentieth century documented in Chapter 1 is not just an empirical fact. It also has theoretical import because it influences the institutional outcomes that follow – specifically, whether weak, strong, or hybrid fiscal regimes emerge in mineral-rich states. In sum, we argue that ownership structure fosters distinct fiscal regimes because it generates the transaction costs (hereafter, TCs) and societal expectations that influence what kinds of rules governing taxation and spending the main claimants to the proceeds from mineral wealth prefer, and the power relations that influence how such institutions emerge, and hence whether they persist. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is twofold: first, to clarify how we conceptualize TCs, societal expectations, and power relations, and second, to provide a theory for how each of these causal mechanisms links different forms of ownership structure to various types of fiscal regimes.
As detailed in Chapter 1, our classification yields four different ideal types of ownership structure – state ownership with control (S1), state ownership without control (S2), private domestic ownership (P1), and private foreign ownership (P2). In this chapter, we focus exclusively on what have historically been its most common and least common forms, respectively: S1 and P1. By 1970, for example, S1 had well surpassed P2 as the dominant form of ownership structure over petroleum wealth in the developing world – a position it retained for over 30 years. In contrast, over the course of the entire twentieth century, only a handful of developing countries have adopted P1.
Appendix A - List of Authors’ Interviews
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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Azerbaijan
Valekh F. Aleskerov, General Manager, Foreign Investments Division, SOCAR, Baku, May 23, 2002
Farda Asadov, Executive Director, Open Society Institute – Azerbaijan, Baku, May 20, 2002
Araz Azimov, Deputy Foreign Minister, Baku, May 20, 2002
Sabit A. Bagirov, President, Entrepreneurship Development Foundation, Baku, May 22, 2002
Foreign Tax Consultant based in Azerbaijan, name withheld, Baku, May 24, 2002
General Secretary, Association of Local Entrepreneurs, Baku, May 22, 2002
Vafa Guluzade, Foreign Policy Advisor to the President, Baku, May 23 2002
Government representative no. 1, name withheld, Embassy of Azerbaijan, Washington D.C., February 18, 2002
Murat Heydarov, Senior Advisor, Security & Political Risk Analysis, British Petroleum (BP) Group, Baku, May 21, 2002
Israil Iskenderov, Executive Director, UMID Humanitarian and Social Support Center, phone interview, December 3, 2009
Ahad Kazimov, Eurasia Partnership Foundation, phone interview, December 8, 2009
Erjan Kurbanov, Associate Director, US – Azerbaijan Council, February 20, 2002
Sheyda Mehdiyeva, Corporate Social Responsibility Advisor, Statoil Apsheron, phone interview, December 10, 2009
Member no. 1, Association of Local Entrepreneurs, name withheld, Baku, May 22, 2002
Member no. 2, Association of Local Entrepreneurs, name withheld, Baku, May 22, 2002
Michael Mered, IMF, Resident Representative in Azerbaijan, Baku, May 24, 2002
Doug Norlen, Pacific Environment, phone interview, October 28, 2009
Representative no. 1, BP Group, name withheld, Baku, May 21, 2002
Representative no. 2, BP Group, name withheld, Baku, May 21, 2002
Representative no. 1, Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC), name withheld, May 25, 2002
Representative no. 2, AIOC, name withheld, May 25, 2002
Robert Rudy, Foreign Advisor to the Ministry of Finance, Baku, May 23, 2002
Gyulshan Rzayeva, Deputy Secretary General, Association of Local Entrepreneurs, Baku, May 22, 2002
Samir Sharifov, Executive Director, State Oil Fund of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ), Baku, May 21, 2002
Karen St. John, Director of Social Performance, BP Group, Baku May 24, 2002
2 - Why Fiscal Regimes
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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The history of state revenue production is the history of the evolution of the state.
– Margaret Levi (1988, 1)All mineral states … are rentier or distributive states.
– Terry Lynn Karl (1997, 49)The conventional literature on the resource curse defines the problem of mineral-rich states as essentially a fiscal one. In short, because they can derive income exclusively from external rents, such states have no need to develop a viable tax system to tap into domestic sources of revenue. Fiscal independence from the domestic population, in turn, affords governing elites the freedom to distribute the state’s income as they please. Mineral-rich states, therefore, are often classified as both rentier states and distributive states.
This focus on fiscal regimes, particularly the extractive side, is understandable considering the overwhelming emphasis on taxation in the general political economy literature. Beginning with Max Weber, it is widely recognized that the ability to generate revenue is a minimal requirement for modern statehood. Simply put: without revenue, state leaders would be unable to perform the basic tasks of staffing the bureaucracy, maintaining social order, and securing their borders (see Levi 1988, Tilly 1975), let alone to fulfill the broader goal of promoting societal welfare (see Skocpol and Amenta 1986). Not surprisingly, then, some have defined the state solely “in terms of [its] taxation powers” (Lieberman 2002, 92 referring to North 1981, 21).
Frontmatter
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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Contents
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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8 - Revisiting the Obsolescing Bargain
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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Russia makes western oil companies fret and fume. Kazakhstan, by comparison, makes them feel rather secure.
– Economist 1992If I had to describe the investment climate [in Kazakhstan] in one word it would be – unpredictable.
– FOC representative 2000 (Authors’ interview)The Kazakhs see the foreigners coming with boat loads of money that is easy cash and taxes for the government.
– USAID representative 2000 (Authors’ interview)In 1999, Kazakhstan marked the centennial of the first major oil gusher discovered on its territory – in Karashungul, Western Kazakhstan (Khusainov and Turkeeva 2003, Tasmagambetov 1999). The celebration that ensued in Atyrau region heralded Kazakhstan’s long history of indigenous petroleum exploration and production. In reality, however, by the end of the 1990s, Kazakhstan’s oil and gas industry no longer reflected its indigenous roots. Only a few years after its independence from Soviet rule, the country’s leadership chose to forge ahead with private foreign ownership (P2). By choosing to sell off the majority of shares (>50 percent) in its production, refining and export facilities to a large number of foreign investors (FIs) in the mid-1990s, Kazakhstan veered 180 degrees away from the ownership structure that it inherited from the Soviet Union – state ownership with control (S1). As a result, in the 1990s the dominance of foreign oil and gas companies in the development of its petroleum industry had to be reconciled with the mirage of “Kazakhstani Oil.”
That its leadership would agree to bequeath both ownership and control over its petroleum industry to foreign oil companies (hereafter, FOCs) took many observers by surprise. At first glance, it did not seem that this newly independent state, which possessed some of the most prized oil fields in the Soviet Union such as the gigantic Tengiz field, and an indigenous cadre of neftyaniki or oilmen, was in dire need of foreign investment. Moreover, oil production had begun to climb in the 1970s in Kazakhstan such that it ranked second only to Russia among the Soviet successor states, which sharply contrasted with Azerbaijan’s dwindling production after having peaked in 1941 (Raballand and Genté 2008, 10–11, Sagers 1994, 271). It was also well known that the Minister of Oil and Gas, Nurlan Balgimbayev, opposed the privatization plan introduced under Prime Minister Akezhan Kazhegeldin in 1995 (Peck 2004, 150). Yet, owing to the domestic constraints that Kazakhstan’s governing elites faced at independence (discussed in Chapter 9), they were unable either to retain S1 or to adopt state ownership without control (S2), and instead, opted to pursue what is arguably the least preferred ownership structure from the state’s perspective – private foreign ownership (P2).
10 - The Myth of the Resource Curse
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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The resource curse is a reasonably solid fact.
– Jeffrey Sachs 2001The link between mineral resource extraction and child development is a paradoxical one. This ‘resource curse’ is both unjust and unnecessary.
– Save the Children 2003The first Law of Petropolitics posits the following: The price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in oil-rich petrolist states.
– Thomas Friedman 2006This book provides compelling evidence that one of the core assumptions of the conventional literature on the resource curse – namely that ownership structure does not vary and thus cannot hold any explanatory power – is not only unfounded but also has impeded our understanding of the relationship between mineral wealth and institutions. More specifically, we utilize the experience of the Soviet successor states to demonstrate first, that ownership structure can vary even across countries that share the same institutional legacy; and second, that this variation helps explain the divergence in their fiscal regimes, and hence developmental trajectories, from the early 1990s through the mid-2000s. By documenting the variation in ownership structure over the course of the twentieth century, moreover, we show conclusively that treating ownership structure as a constant not only deprives us of a key explanatory variable but also cannot be substantiated empirically.
Our findings thus also make a strong case for broadening our historical perspective. As we describe in Chapter 1, both the assumption that mineral wealth is always and necessarily state-owned and the conflation of state ownership with control have gone unquestioned for so long precisely because they reflected the empirical reality of the narrow time period under study – that is, from roughly the late 1960s to early 1990s. During this period, there was a clear convergence toward state ownership due to the nationalization wave that swept across mineral-rich states in the developing world beginning in the early 1960s. Less than a decade later, more than three-quarters of petroleum sectors in the developing world were state-owned. (See Appendix B for details). It is also during this period that the locus of bargaining power shifted from foreign investors to host governments via the onset of the obsolescing bargain. As a result, the fiscal regimes fostered under state ownership with control (S1) and state ownership without control (S2) were virtually indistinguishable – as were their negative social, political, and economic consequences (see Chapter 6 for details).
7 - Eluding the Obsolescing Bargain
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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Oil incomes serve the people, it is an integral part of the oil strategy, oil incomes should effectively serve the Azerbaijani people. With this aim, the State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan has been set up. The creation of this Oil Fund is a very significant event in the modern history of Azerbaijan. This fund meets all the international standards and its activity is transparent.
– President Ilham Aliev, inauguration ceremony (October 31, 2003).Unless people feel they are benefiting from our presence then it’s not going to be a sustainable environment for us to do business.… We need to be here not just for a few years, but for the next few decades.
– David Woodward, President of BP Azerbaijan, speaking on the day of the opening of the BTC pipeline (May 25, 2005, The Times)While both Uzbekistan and the Russian Federation rebuffed prospective foreign investors (FIs) after the demise of the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan’s decision to involve FIs in the exploitation of its petroleum sector through state ownership without control (S2) in the early 1990s denoted a significant departure from the ownership structure it inherited from the Soviet Union – state ownership with control (S1) – that since the abolition of Lenin’s New Economic Policy in the 1920s shunned “foreign capitalists.” Azerbaijan’s decision to pursue S2 after achieving independence, furthermore, coincided with a worldwide resurgence in foreign investment in the exploration for and production of petroleum at the end of the twentieth century. According to our research, in the year 2000, approximately 75 percent of 47 petroleum-rich countries in the developing world had opted for direct foreign involvement in their petroleum sector either in the form of S2 (~38%) or P2 (~36%).
As we show in Chapter 6, ownership structures where FIs are actively involved do not operate in a historical vacuum but rather within a specific international context. Because Azerbaijan adopted S2 in the 1990s, it offers an opportunity to test its effects on fiscal outcomes during what we designate as the third time period (1990–2005), which commenced with the emergence of new norms regarding the way that businesses conduct their operations abroad, accompanied by new actors (INGOs and IFIs) seeking to diffuse these norms. This particular international context mediates the direct effects of S2 on our three causal mechanisms, generating negligible transaction costs (TCs), high societal expectations vis-à-vis both the FIs and governing elites, and power relations that can favor either the FIs or the host government. Although each of these three mechanisms is at work in promoting incentives for hybrid fiscal regimes – that is, fiscal regimes that are only partially constraining and enabling – due to the uncertainty surrounding which set of actors will ultimately enforce the model contract in the 1990s, coercion takes on greater significance in determining which of the four potential hybrid fiscal regimes depicted in Chapter 6 is most likely to emerge in Azerbaijan.
1 - Rethinking the Resource Curse
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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Petro-states share a similar path-dependent history and structuration of choice … the exploitation of petroleum produced a similarity in property rights, tax structures, vested interests, economic models, and thus frameworks for decision-making across different governments and regime types.
– Terry Lynn Karl (1997, 227)For the quality of our understanding of current problems depends largely on the broadness of our frame of reference.
– Alexander Gershenkron (1962, 6)The negative consequences of mineral abundance in developing countries – poor economic performance, unbalanced growth, impoverished populations, weak states, and authoritarian regimes – are widely accepted among highly respected academics, international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), international financial institutions (IFIs), and even representatives of the popular media. This is particularly true of petroleum. Indeed, some have gone so far as to declare that the resource curse is “a reasonably solid fact” (Sachs and Warner 2001, 837), while others have proclaimed that there is a “Law of Petropolitics” whereby “[t]he price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in oil-rich states” (Friedman 2006, 31). Nigeria’s experience with petroleum provides a vivid illustration of this so-called “curse” of wealth. Although its government has accrued $350 billion in oil revenues since independence in 1960, between 1970 and 2000 its economy shrunk dramatically, its poverty rate “increased from close to 36 percent to just under 70 percent” (Sala-i-Martin and Subramanian 2003, 3) and its political regime “has become increasingly centralized and oppressive” (Jensen and Wantchekon 2004, 819).
But few seem to agree as to exactly why mineral wealth allegedly produces such negative outcomes. The most prominent explanations for economic stagnation focus on the direct effect that export windfalls have on the real exchange rate. In short, by shifting production inputs to the booming mineral sector and nontradable sector, they reduce the competitiveness of the nonbooming export sectors and hence precipitate their collapse (i.e., “Dutch Disease”) (see Auty 2001b). Others stress the indirect effects that export windfalls have on retarded economic growth through promoting corruption and indebtedness while discouraging productive long-term investment (see Gylfason 2001, Leite and Weidmann 1999). On the political side, the prevalence of authoritarian regimes in mineral-rich states, for example, is largely attributed to the effect that centralized access to export revenue, particularly during a boom, has on regime type by increasing the government’s fiscal independence and consequently decreasing both the ability and willingness of the general population to hold its leaders accountable (see Ross 2001a, Wantchekon 1999).
Appendix B - Variation in Ownership Structure in Developing Countries
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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6 - State Ownership without Control versus Private Foreign Ownership
- Pauline Jones Luong, Brown University, Rhode Island, Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
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We need to use transparency in revenue and financial management to allow people to hold government to account and build public trust … but companies have an interest in promoting transparency too. Transparency should help companies to reduce reputational risk, to address the concerns of shareholders and to help manage risks of long-term investments. And transparency is a positive contribution to development as it increases the likelihood that revenues will be used for poverty reduction.
– Prime Minister Tony Blair commenting on EITI, London, 2003Corporations … are increasingly being asked to step into roles that were once the domain of governments or international bodies such as the UN.
– Jim Buckee, CEO Talisman Energy, cited in Kobrin (2004, 455)In the preceding chapters we make a general case for the importance of ownership structure in understanding the relationship between mineral wealth and fiscal regimes over time. To recap, we argue that a country’s choice of ownership structure over mineral wealth rather than mineral wealth per se is responsible for the negative outcomes that are so prevalent in mineral-rich states. Ownership structure, however, does not exist in a historical vacuum, but rather, within a specific international context. Because petroleum is such an important international commodity, the influence of actors and norms outside the domestic arena is often unavoidable. This is most apparent where foreign investors (hereafter, FIs) are directly involved in the exploitation of mineral reserves; that is, when governments adopt the two remaining ideal types of ownership structure – state ownership without control (S2) and private foreign ownership (P2).
Indeed, the heightened role of FIs sets S2 and P2 apart from the other two ideal types discussed in Chapter 3 (S1 and P1) in two equally important ways. First, they can only produce fiscal regimes that are partially constraining and enabling – or what we call “hybrid” – because their primary influence is within the mineral sector – that is, on the size, stability, composition, and degree of transparency of the FIs’ fiscal burden, which, in turn, can affect both the quality of citizens’ daily lives and the long-term developmental prospects of mineral-rich states. Second, their effect on fiscal regimes is dynamic. As different actors gain and lose prominence in this sector at the international level, they can transform the impact of ownership structure itself on the triadic relationship between the primary direct claimants to the proceeds from mineral wealth (here, FIs) and the primary indirect claimants (here, governing elites and their societies). More specifically, changes at the international level mediate the direct effects of ownership structure on the three mechanisms we identify in Chapter 3: (1) transaction costs (hereafter, TCs), (2) societal expectations, and (3) power relations. The purpose of this chapter is both to enumerate the distinct effects of S2 and P2 on fiscal outcomes in mineral-rich states and to elucidate how their effects vary over the course of the twentieth century with particular emphasis on the most recent time period (1990–2005).