Suchergebnisse

This article examines the relationship between oil wealth and the adoption of economic liberalization, specifically financial and investment reforms. It argues that volatility in the international oil market renders oil-producing countries less likely to adopt financial and investment liberalization. This is particularly the case for long-term oil producers in the developing world who had firsthand experience with colonialism. A statistical analysis confirms these hypotheses after controlling for rival factors. Despite pressures for countries to work toward greater economic liberalization, oil wealth and the legacy of colonialism can lead countries away from reform in certain policy areas.

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has strengthened its regulatory and financial institutions and adopted many reforms concerning its business environment. Yet, Saudi Arabia seems an unlikely country to succeed at implementing business environment reforms given the presence of an authoritarian state and rent-seeking behavior from elites that is the outcome of oil wealth. What explains the ability of Saudi Arabia to initiate reforms that many states have struggled to implement or uniformly reject? This paper argues that the country's monarchical system helps the government solve the credible commitment problem with private sector elites, thereby facilitating business environment reforms. The monarchical system does this by legitimizing and reinforcing the institution of economic familism. The salience of this institution provides a reliable guarantee to private sector elites that their rents and business interests will be protected during the reform process. The case of Saudi Arabia stands as an important example of how absolute monarchies can pursue certain economic reforms, and also how an informal institution can solve the credible commitment problem in an authoritarian context where formal institutions are either absent or weak.

This article examines state repression in the Iranian bazaar during the anti-profiteering campaign from 1975–1977. While many have argued that the anti-profiteering campaign helped spark the revolutionary mobilization of the bazaar itself, this article posits that scholars should also consider the notion that the campaign helped to foster popular support for the revolutionary movement as a whole. Given the bazaar's ties to middle and lower classes of Iranian society, as well as their status as the country's "economic barometer," this article presents the theory that the anti-profiteering campaign played a role in generating popular discontent against the former regime in the period just prior to the 1979 Revolution.

The book deals with some aspects of employment and labour markets in sub-Saharan Africa. Labour markets include not only labour working for wages but also those pursuing their livelihood through self-employment in the agricultural and service and the informal manufacturing sectors. The book begins with a thorough treatment of the trends in employment and labour earnings in the formal wage sector. Part 2 analyzes labour market trends in the formal sector, largely relying on the data for the manufacturing sector. Part 3 is devoted to the interrelationship between income differentials, rural-urban migration and the incidence of poverty. Part 4 raises the question whether the trend decline in wages in African manufacturing increases the external competitiveness of African manufacturing. Before drawing conclusions the authors study in detail (part 5) the earnings and other labour variables in terms of the characteristics of different types of firms in manufacturing. (DÜI-Sbd)

AbstractThis paper examines the relationship between economic specialization and government expenditures. We hypothesize that citizens and firms in economically specialized regions pressure politicians to invest in core economic sectors in lieu of spending on public goods that benefit the broader economy, such as education. We investigate our hypothesis through an examination of the United States and India. We confirm a negative relationship between economically specialized U.S. states and education spending, and a positive relationship between economically specialized U.S. states and firm subsidies. Next, we examine the effects of an immediate shock in a region's level of economic specialization by comparing Indian states created from federal bifurcation. We show how the creation of two highly specialized states (Bihar and Jharkhand) from a diversified state (Undivided Bihar) was associated with a decline in education spending but an increase in subsidies for core sectors.