Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Is oil wealth a blessing or a curse? Only a few oil states outside of the Middle East have been able to successfully ride out the oil booms and busts of the 1970s and 80s without significant damage to their economies, while many comparable states have experienced economic and political instability. But was wealth or lack there of from oil revenues the immediate source of such instability? This paper seeks to continue discussing this question while analyzing all oil dependent states through the boom and bust years mentioned above. This will show if oil was the direct source of political instability, as some scholars stated in previous work, or if there are other causes for the political instability experienced in countries such as Nigeria and Iran, by looking at all of the twenty or so states that experienced similar economic effects from oil. The same methods as used in Terry Karl's Paradox of Plenty will be applied to the additional cases not studied in that book, where the argument was made that fluxes in oil revenue create political instability, to show not all of the cases are like those analyzed by Karl. Additional levels of quantitative and qualitative analysis will also advocate that oil wealth did not directly cause political instability in oil dependent nations outside of the Middle East during the 1970s and 80s. This paper will advocate that one focus on the level of state capacity to manage the booms and the busts in oil revenues.