Abstract
This chapter and the other chapters in this volume explicitly and specifically focus on the political economy of Natural Resource Funds (NRFs) or resource-based Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) in order to better illuminate how the potential negative distributional consequences of resource wealth management (or the resource curse) may make decisions regarding NRFs decidedly political and contentious in ways that other forms of SWFs may not be. In turn, the latter insights are important contributions to the debate over the resource curse and the questions of whether or not, and under what political and economic conditions, NRFs can help in mitigating this “curse.” These insights help us further understand the politics of resource-dependent economies, the political, social, and economic forces that shape resource wealth management, and the continuity and changes of these interactions.
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Notes
- 1.
The Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute (SWFI) [2016] defines an SWF as “a state-owned investment fund or entity that is commonly established from balance of payments surpluses, official foreign currency operations, the proceeds of privatizations, government transfer payments, fiscal surpluses, and/or receipt resulting from resource exports.”
- 2.
We acknowledge, as scholars writing on the changing political economy of rentier state or “late” rentierism (for example, Gray 2011; Yamada and Herto 2020) have done, that rentierism is not predestined, is open to shifts amid continuity, and states’ rentier practices can be challenged from below, even if partial. As Bazoobandi noted (in this volume), a confluence of factors, including the oil price collapse of 2014, the emergence of crown prince Mohammed bin Salman as likely heir to the throne, and the launch of the economic and social reform program Vision 2030, strained the traditional ‘rentier bargain’ in Saudi Arabia. These factors have led to a change of rentier strategies regarding the distribution and sharing of oil rents, with the Public Investment Fund (PIF) playing a central role in this changing rentier dynamics and continuing (re)negotiations of power balance between the ruling family and between state and society.
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Okpanachi, E., Chowdhari Tremblay, R. (2021). Introduction: The Political Economy of Natural Resource Funds (NRFs). In: Okpanachi, E., Chowdhari Tremblay, R. (eds) The Political Economy of Natural Resource Funds. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78251-1_1
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