?
The political economy of natural resources: the mechanisms of resource rent allocation in oil-producing economies
Why do governments of some nations successfully collect resource revenues while governments of other countries fail to do so? This thesis addresses the ability of the state to convert resource rent into government income. Using a mixed-methods research design, I seek to analyze the fundamental conditions that either allow governments to appropriate a large share of resource rent or hinder them from doing so. I investigate the influence of two structural factors on the collection of resource revenues: (1) the ownership structure of the petroleum industry and (2) state capacity. I test two primary hypotheses in this dissertation. First, I hypothesize that governments collect more resource revenues in countries with nationalized petroleum industries than in countries with privatized petroleum industries. Second, I hypothesize that the more robust state capacities in an oil-producing country are, the more significant share of total resource rents the country’s government should transform into its revenues. I run random-effect regressions to test these two hypotheses. The statistical analysis shows that in countries with nationalized petroleum industries, the government tends to collect a more significant part of resource rents than in countries with privatized petroleum industries. Moreover, the statistical analysis demonstrates that governments tend to collect more resource revenues in countries with more robust state capacity than in countries with weaker state capacity. I also do a comparative analysis of Russia and Venezuela in this dissertation. The critical puzzle I seek to examine in my case studies is how to explain the highly different trajectories in resource rent collection in Russia and Venezuela, two countries with nationalized petroleum industries, at the beginning of the 21st century. The puzzle is that in the 2000s and early 2010s, the government of Venezuela collected only 10-15 percent of its total oil rent, while the Russian federal government collected around 60-70 percent of all resource revenues. In the comparative analysis of Russia and Venezuela, I study how changes in petroleum ownership, state capacities, and elite competition have historically affected the allocation of resource revenues in these countries.
