The Political Economy of Resources and Development offers a unique and multidisciplinary perspective on how the commodity boom of the mid-2000s reshaped the model of development throughout Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world. Governments increased taxes and royalties on the resource sector, the nationalization of foreign firms returned to the mainstream economic policy agenda, and public spending on social and developmental goals surged. These trends, often described as resource nationalism, have developed into a strategy for economic development, generated a re-imagining of the state and its institutional possibilities, and created a new but very significant political risk for extractive enterprises. However, these innovations, which constitute the most dramatic change in development policy in Latin America since the advent of neoliberalism, have so far received little attention from either academic or policy-oriented publications. This book explores the reasons behind these policies, and their effects on states, firms, and development trajectories. This text brings together renowned thematic experts to examine the political-economic causes of resource nationalism, as well as its manifestation in six Latin American countries. The causal variables considered by the contributors to this collection include a range of political-economic determinants of policy including commodity prices; the influence of ideology and national politics; ideas about industrial policy; relations between host governments and investors; and how countries respond to opportunities provided by regional initiatives and the new geography of the global economy. This volume is essential reading in development economics, political economy, and Latin American studies, as well as for those who want to understand what economic development means after neoliberalism.

Rents to Riches> focuses on the political economy of the detailed decisions that governments make at each step of the natural resource management (NRM) value chain. Many resource-dependent developing countries pursue seemingly shortsighted and suboptimal policies when extracting, taxing, and investing resource rents. The book contextualizes these micro-level outcomes with an emphasis on two central political economy dimensions: the degree to which governments can make credible intertemporal commitments to both resource developers and citizens, and the degree to which governments and inclined to turn resource rents into public goods. Almost 1.5 billion people live in the more than 50 World Bank client countries classified as resource-dependent. A detailed understanding of the way political economy characteristics affect the NRM decisions made in these countries by governments, extractive developers, and society can improve the design of interventions to support welfare-enhancing policy making and governance in the natural resource sectors. Featuring case study work from Africa (Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Niger, Nigeria), East Asia and Pacific (the Lao People's Democratic Republic, Mongolia, Timor-Leste), and Latin America and the Caribbean (Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Trinidad an dTobago_, the book provides guidance for government clients, domestic stakeholders, and development partners committed to transforming natural resource into sustainable development riches.

This book provides a fresh and extensive discussion of corruption issues in natural resources sectors. Reflecting on recent debates in corruption research and revisiting resource curse challenges in light of political ecology approaches, this volume provides a series of nuanced and policy-relevant case studies analyzing patterns of corruption around natural resources and options to reach anti-corruption goals. The potential for new variations of the resource curse in the forest and urban land sectors and the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies in resource sectors are considered in depth. Corruption in oil, gas, mining, fisheries, biofuel, wildlife, forestry and urban land are all covered, and potential solutions discussed.

This Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the latest research from leading scholars on the international political economy of energy and resources. Highlighting the important conceptual and empirical themes, the chapters study all levels of governance, from global to local, and explore the wide range of issues emerging in a changing political and economic environment.

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

The challenges in using and managing natural resources in Indonesia are immense. They include ensuring that resource utilisation benefits most Indonesians. Examines this and other related issues from a political, socio-economic, and environmental standpoint.

This volume focuses on the political economy surrounding the detailed decisions that governments make at each step of the value chain for natural resource management. From the perspective of public interest or good governance, many resource-dependent developing countries pursue apparently short-sighted and sub-optimal policies in relation to the extraction and capture of resource rents, and to spending and savings from their resource endowments. This work contextualizes these micro-level choices and outcomes.

Since the Rio ‘Earth’ Summit of 1992, sustainable development has become the major policy response to tackling global environmental degradation, from climate change to loss of biodiversity and deforestation. Market instruments such as emissions trading, payments for ecosystem services and timber certification have become the main mechanisms for financing the sustainable management of the earth’s natural resources. Yet how effective are they – and do they help the planet and developing countries, or merely uphold the economic status quo? This book investigates these important questions. Providing a comprehensive analysis and the latest research on sustainable development, the authors compare the divergent approaches to emissions trading. Included is a detailed investigation into illegal logging and the effectiveness of policy responses, with an evaluation of different forest certification schemes. Biodiversity offsets and environmental payments are also explored. Integral to the book are interviews and opinions of the key stakeholders in the political economy of sustainable development. This uniquely comprehensive analysis of the governance quality of different sustainable development mechanisms, unprecedented in its panorama of comparative case studies, is essential reading for all those in the policy, academic and non-governmental communities.

Industrialist John Paul Getty famously quipped, “The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights.” Throughout history, natural resources have been sources of wealth and power and catalysts for war and peace. The cases studies gathered in this innovative volume examine how the intersection of ideas, interest groups, international institutions, and political systems gave birth to distinctive regulatory regimes at various times and places in the modern world. Spanning seven continents and focusing on both advanced and developing economies, the case studies explore how the goals and modes of regulation have changed in response to new economic realities, demands from power brokers and the broader public, and rules and norms for what is considered legitimate government action. Together, the contributors show that regulatory regimes in resource-dependent nations have played a decisive role in the international political economy. They also offer unique insights into why some resource-rich countries have flourished while others have been mired in poverty and corruption.

This paper presents a critical survey of the literature on the "resource curse", focusing on three main questions: (i) are natural resources bad for development?; (ii) what causes the resource curse?; and, (iii) how can the resource curse be overcome? In respect of these questions, three observations are made. First, while the literature provides considerable evidence that natural resource abundance is associated with various negative development outcomes, this evidence is by no means conclusive. Second, existing explanations for the resource curse do not adequately account for the role of social forces or external political and economic environments in shaping development outcomes in resource abundant countries, nor for the fact that, while most resource abundant countries have performed poorly in developmental terms, a few have done quite well. Finally, recommendations for overcoming the resource curse have not generally taken into account the issue of political feasibility.