CREECA Lecture Series

Pauline Luong will discuss the two central claims made by the book "Oil is not a Curse: Ownership Structure and Institutions in Soviet Successor States." First, mineral-rich states are cursed not by their wealth but by the ownership structure they chose to manage their mineral wealth. Second, weak institutions are not inevitable in mineral-rich states. The experience of the five petroleum-rich Soviet successor states provides a clear challenge to both of these assumptions.