Congratulations to Aleksei Pobedonostsev from the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences for receiving his doctorate in July 2023, after an unanimous decisions from the jury.
Aleksei Pobedonostsev defended his thesis entitled, The Political Economy of Natural Resources. The mechanisms of resource rent allocation in oil-producing economies on 25 July 2023.
How do rentier states get their hands on resource rents? The large literature on the resource curse largely skirts the issue. All too often, the capacity to extract resource rents for government use is simply taken for granted. It shouldn't. As Pobedonostsev's carefully crafted thesis shows, the capacity of governments to appropriate rents from oil production varies greatly over time and across space. In his thesis, he argues that three factors account for this variance: the ownership structure of the oil industry (public or private), state capacity (strong or weak), and the intensity of elite competition (high or law). Pobedonostsev uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative evidence to prove his point. All reviewers praised the thesis for its innovative research question: it promises to close an important gap in the political economy literature of development.
Read Aleksei Pobedonostsev's thesis in Cadmus.