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Between 1973 and 1980, the cost of crude oil rose suddenly and dramatically, precipitating convulsions in international politics. Conventional wisdom holds that international capital markets adjusted automatically and remarkably well: enormous amounts of money flowed into oil-rich states, and efficient markets then placed that new money in cash-poor Third World economies. David Spiro has followed the money trail, and the story he tells contradicts the accepted beliefs. Most of the sudden flush of new oil wealth didn't go to poor oil-importing countries around the globe. Instead, the United States made a deal with Saudi Arabia to sell it U.S. securities in secret, a deal resulting in a substantial portion of Saudi assets being held by the U.S. government. With this arrangement, the U.S. government violated its agreements with allies in the developed world. Spiro argues that American policymakers took this action to prop up otherwise intolerable levels of U.S. public debt. In effect, recycled OPEC wealth subsidized the debt-happy policies of the U.S. government as well as the debt-happy consumption of its citizenry.
This is a detailed study of the political and economic condition of the Republic of the Gabon which focuses on the years of the oil boom (1975-1985).
The emerging consensus that institutions shape political and economic outcomes has produced few theories of institutional change and no defensible theory of institutional origination. Kiren Aziz Chaudhry shows how state and market institutions are created and transformed in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, two countries that typify labor and oil exporters in the developing worlds.In a world where the international economy dramatically affects domestic developments, the question of where institutions come from becomes at once more urgent and more complex. In both Saudi Arabia and Yemen, fundamental state and market institutions forged during a period of isolation at the end of World War I were destroy...
It is widely thought that state ownership of natural resources, oil and natural gas in particular, causes countries to fall under the sway of the “resource curse.” In such cases, governments allegedly display “resource nationalism,” which destabilizes the economy, society, and politics. In this book, David R. Mares dispels these beliefs and develops a powerful new account of the relationship between state resource ownership and energy policy. Mares examines variations in energy policy across a wide range of countries, underscoring the fact that in most of the world outside the United States, subsoil natural resources are owned by the state. He considers the history of Latin American ...
A great merit of this stimulating volume lies in the fact that, by Locke's open, explicit claim of the priority to be accorded to a local rather than a national perspective in the interpretation of Italian political economy-and more generally in his interpretation of political economies of advanced democracies within a changing global environment-he urges interested readers to adopt a point of view.
By the early 1980s the average American had a lower standard of living than the average Norwegian or Dane. Standards of living in the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, and Austria also rivaled those in the United States. How have seven small democracies achieved economic success and what can they teach America? In Small States in World Markets, Peter Katzenstein examines the successes of these economically vulnerable nations of Western Europe, showing that they have managed to stay economically competitive while at the same time preserving their political institutions. Too dependent on world trade to impose protection, and lacking the resources to transform their domestic industries...
To citizens and political analysts alike, United States trade law is an incoherent conglomeration of policies, both liberal and protectionist. Seeking to understand the contradictions in American policy, Judith Goldstein offers the first book to demonstrate the impact of the political past on today's trade decisions. As she traces the history of trade agreements from the antebellum era through the 1980s, she addresses a fundamental question: What effects do shared ideas about economics—as opposed to national power or individual self-interest—have on the institutions that make and enforce trade law? Goldstein argues that successful ideas become embedded in institutions and typically outli...
Despite increasingly open markets and a pervasive move toward international production methods, national governments continue to pursue remarkably distinctive policies for promoting innovation in industry. J. Nicholas Ziegler analyzes this apparent paradox by comparing government efforts to promote technological advance in Germany and France. His findings reveal a great deal about the roots and limits of public strategies for economic growth. Through close comparison of three technologies— digital telephone exchanges, computer-controlled machine tools, and semiconductors—Ziegler shows how each country displays predictable strengths and weaknesses in promoting innovation. These distinctiv...
On the basis of these findings, this dissertation concludes that the dynamics of state withdrawal from the oil sector in post-Soviet context are determined primarily by structural organization of domestic oil industry inherited from the Soviet era, resulting balance of power between the state and private sectoral actors, and general mode of state-society relations in each country.