Oil Abundance and Economic Growth

This book deals with the role of oil abundance in economic growth. The major theoretical contribution of the analysis is the transformation of the rentier state theory into the language of mathematical economics. The mathematical formalization of the rentier state theory enables a more sophisticated analytical tool for the assessment of the role of nonrenewable resource revenues in economic growth and institutional dynamics. The embedding of the elements of a rentier state into the labor surplus economy framework leads to grave consequences as reflected in the quantitative part of the survey. The augmented labor surplus economy model shows that both the political economy and the purely economic causes of the resource curse can have similar effects on the resource allocation in the affected nation. Hence, it is not possible to use econometric tools to compartmentalize the effects of the Dutch disease and those explanations based upon political economy. This is the reason why one can only estimate the total growth effects of oil revenues. Besides cross-country panel estimations, a case study of Azerbaijan provides additional insights into petroleum based economic development. These international panel and country specific estimations are partly based on the two sector model of economic growth. In the case of Azerbaijan, a vector error correction model, which is based upon the behavioral model of the equilibrium exchange rate, is applied to detect the Dutch disease tendencies. Elkhan Richard Sadik-Zada is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Development Research and Development Policy (IEE), Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He holds a doctoral degree in International Development Studies from the Ruhr University Bochum. In his research activities, he mainly focuses on resource economics, macroeconomics, applied econometrics, application of evolutionary equations in economics and the role of institutions in economic development.