Abstract
Are sectorally dependent states destined to regime instability as a result of chornic fiscal crisis? Literature emphasizing the importance of a country’s sectoral endowment suggests that oil exporters in particular should exhibit similar policy stagnation and regime decay as a result of fiscal crisis. The cases of Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain in the 1980s and 1990s demonstrate that fiscal crisis outcomes are not uniform. This article develops the critique that structuralist assumptions about what drives business-state relations during crisis are flawed. Abstract logics typing exogenous price sifts to the character of business-state interaction neglect the historical and instituional grounding of those relations. It is variation in the historical and institutional crafting of business-state relations that best explains how these relations shape reform under crisis and how regime stability is affected.
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Additional information
Pete W. Moore is assistant professor of political science at the University of Miami, Coral Gables. He is also a senior research fellow at the Inter-University Consortium for Arab and Middle East Studies, Montreal. His current project is a comparative examination of business-state relations in several Arab countries.
Important comments and criticism were provided by Gregory Gause, Jill Crystal, and an anonymous reviewer for SCID. Research funding was provided by the Fulbright Commission, the Social Science Research Council, and the Inter-University Consortium for Arab and Middle East Studies, Montreal.
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Moore, P.W. Rentier fiscal crisis and regime stability: Business-state relations in the Gulf. St Comp Int Dev 37, 34–56 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02686337
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02686337