Abstract
This critical survey demonstrates for the first time that the underlying tenets of the resource curse/blessing are borrowed directly from “staple theory”. It also focuses uniquely on appropriability with two key issues in mind: (1) state appropriability of assets, and (2) the mobility of assets to thwart appropriation. In the previous resource curse literature, mobility has been framed using the concept of lootability. Appropriability is related to non-lootable assets, such as oil, that can be seized by the state or rival private oligarchs. Recent resource curse research has addressed appropriability by distinguishing between point-source resources and diffuse-source resources. This survey demonstrates that this distinction is borrowed from staple theory, and that point-source and diffuse-source resources are defined in terms of geographical concentration/dispersion rather than institutional characteristics. By establishing that political institutions, markets and incentives are the most important elements for determining appropriability, the resource curse/blessing literature could support a general positive theory of the predatory state.
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Notes
While in American English, “staple” refers to foods such as rice and potatoes that are part of virtually everyone’s diet, the term was used initially to describe ‘cod fisheries’ and ‘fur trade’, and then extended to the chief commodity produced by a region. As North wrote: “It is customarily thought of as describing products of extractive industry. Since my concept of the export commodities of a region may include products of secondary or tertiary industry as well, I shall use the term ‘exportable commodities’ (or services) to denote the individual items, and the export base to denote collectively the exportable commodities (or services) of a region. In young regions, typically dependent on extractive industry, my exportable commodities and Innis’s export staples are synonymous” (North 1955, pp. 247–248). Innis’s focus (1930/1956, 1940/1954) was on cod fisheries and the fur trade to explain Canadian economic growth. Staple theory is not orthodox economic theory. Its key premise is that national economic growth can be generated by exporting a staple good (particularly export crops and minerals). It was argued that staple production is a potent force in long-term economic development by means of linkage effects (forward, backward and final demand). The theory was largely a Canadian creation (Mackintosh and Innis) that was taken up and made more general by Douglass North, Baldwin, Hirschman, Watkins and Caves after the Second World War. A pessimist version of the theory points to the possibility of a staple “trap” owing to the absence of linkage effects for some such commodities. Baldwin’s bipolar economy provides an illustration of the staple trap. The historical background and the evolution of the ‘staple theory’ are substantiated in North (1955), Baldwin (1956), Watkins (1963) and Schedvin (1990). Staple theory has been a source of inspiration for recent work in economic history (Engerman and Sokoloff 1997; Sokoloff and Engerman 2000; Nugent and Robinson 2010). Section 3 will elaborate on the theory and its relationship to the natural resource curse in greater detail.
Although the theory was originally Canadian, some authors have formulated it independently in other contexts. For example, Shafer (1994, p. 2; emphasis added) developed a sectoral analysis of the developmental prospects of states according to which a state’s capacity to promote economic development depends on the “attributes of the leading sector through which it is tied to the international economy: light manufacturing, mineral extraction, peasant cash crop production, or industrial plantation crop production”. While he never explicitly referred to staple theory, he rediscovered it through his comparative political economy.
Several formalized versions of the staple theory have been formulated. Caves (1963) offered an elegant model of ‘vent for surplus’, and suggested a connection with neoclassical growth theory.
Kindleberger (1958) appears to have been correct in modeling three scenarios regarding the effects of foreign trade on economic development, namely leading, lagging and balancing effects.
A Venezuelan energy minister and a founder of OPEC named Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo complained in 1975: “I call petroleum the devil's excrement. It brings trouble…. Look at this locura—waste, corruption, consumption, our public services falling apart. And debt, debt we shall have for years” (The Economist, May 22, 2003).
Collier and Hoeffler (1998, 2004) claimed that primary commodity exports tend to reinforce the probability of civil war. Various other econometric tests of the relationship between civil war and natural resource endowments do not confirm that result (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Elbadawi and Sambanis 2002; Hegre 2002). However, empirical tests often find that lootable commodities such as gemstones and drugs are associated with non-separatist civil wars, whereas oil (an unlootable good) is linked to the onset of separatist civil war (for a general survey, see Ross 2004).
Ross (1999, p. 301) also referred to staple theory, but only to its optimistic version in a footnote, without discussing the staple trap—“States with abundant natural resources could easily overcome these capital shortfalls, thanks to both their ability to export primary commodities and their attractiveness to foreign investors. Their governments would also find it easier to collect revenues and hence provide public goods”—thus ignoring the concept of the staple trap as the resource curse’s precursor.
By ‘South’, the authors mean to include the states of the deep South as well as the mountain states of Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia. “The herding economy moved with the Scotch-Irish to the West—that is, to Texas and Oklahoma and the mostly southern portions of the mountain West that were settled by southerners.” (Ibid, p. 9).
Nisbett and Cohen (1996, p. 8) refer to the immigration of the Scotch-Irish to North America that started in the late seventeenth century and was completed by the early nineteenth century: “Their new land, if anything, served to reinforce the herding economy practiced by the Scotch-Irish immigrants. With its mountains and wide-open spaces, America, especially the Appalachians and the South, was ideally suited to the herding life and to horticulture.”
Unfortunately, the authors did not acknowledge Scott’s ‘paternity’ in this respect. While their model captures Scott’s distinction between the two types of cultivars in archaic agricultural economies, their approach to the state as provider of public goods (Mayshar et al. 2015, pp. 4, 6) is diametrically opposed to Scott’s viewpoint of the state as a predatory institution. That point is highlighted by Scott (2017, p. 268), who wrote, “While Mayshar et al. correctly associate cereal grains with state and hierarchy and root crops with nonstate, egalitarian societies, they wrongly take subsistence strategies as a primordial given and not the product of political institutions and political choice.”
Humphreys et al. (2007) identified four sources of income volatility: variation in rates of extraction over time; variability in the timing of payments by corporations to states; fluctuations in the value of the natural resource produced; and international lending that follows oil ‘boom–bust’ cycles.
Oil can serve as collateral, or at least as an informal guarantee, because oil earnings are easy to identify and to direct toward debt servicing (Humphreys et al. 2007).
Unlike alluvial diamonds, kimberlite diamonds require skilled labor for extraction and therefore are vulnerable to state appropriation rather than to looting by rebels.
Robinson et al. (2006, p. 448) criticized “the Becker-Olson approach of thinking of the state as simply an aggregator of pressure from interest groups”. However, Becker and Olson took different approaches regarding lobbying activities in the political market and must be distinguished (see Vahabi 2011).
Nugent and Robinson (2010, pp. 47, 54) explicitly referred to “the powerful set of ideas developed in the context of the ‘staple thesis’”. But they did not consider endowments to be fate, commenting, “Contrary to the nascent literature in economics attempting to explain institutional differences, our research suggests that the equilibrium institutional structure is not uniquely determined by factor endowments and depends crucially on the nature of political cleavages and competition in society.”
Many other secondary factors—for example, the ‘storability’ or ‘perishability’ of assets, their ‘vulnerability to disease’, and their character as ‘labor-intensive’ or ‘capital-intensive’—affect the appropriability of assets (for an analysis of how those factors affect crops, see Scott 2009, pp. 202–204). Vahabi (2016a, b) focused on only the primary factors influencing all types of assets (physical as well as pecuniary).
Conventional indicators of institutional quality are not appropriate for measuring institutional appropriability. New indicators, such as the sizes of armies, the backgrounds of elites, the types of state revenues and spending programs, and geopolitical positioning in international politics (among others), are needed to fully capture institutional appropriability.
According to Snyder and Bhavani (2005, p. 571), spending on tax capacity increases the state’s “take” both from artisans and industrial firms. This form of state spending “should be considered a revenue-enhancing investment because it leads directly to an increase in future revenue”.
Spending on coercive capacity means increasing the state’s ability to identify and punish tax evaders. Moreover, “spending on coercive capacity has a revenue-conserving effect, because it improves the state’s ability to deter and defeat rebellions and thereby reduces the risk of the loss of revenue as a result of societal unrest.” (Snyder and Bhavani, 2005, p. 571).
“Assets” includes all types of goods, such as agricultural products like cereals and famine goods, and is not limited to natural resources such as oil, narcotics, or diamonds or other gemstones.
As explained earlier (see introduction and Sect. 3), staple thesis insists on the importance of staples (defined as ‘exportable commodities or services’) in enhancing national economic growth through linkage effects (forward, backward and final demand).
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Acknowledgements
I wholeheartedly thank my four anonymous referees, the associate editor Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard, and the editor-in-chief William Shughart of the Public Choice journal for their excellent and constructive comments. I would also like to present my gratitude to Bertrand Crettez, Alain Desdoigts, Antonio Savoia, Kunal Sen, Tarik Tazdait and Mandana Vahabi for their inspiring and insightful remarks on earlier versions of this paper. Obviously, all the remaining errors are mine.
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Vahabi, M. The resource curse literature as seen through the appropriability lens: a critical survey. Public Choice 175, 393–428 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-018-0533-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-018-0533-5
Keywords
- Captive and fugitive assets
- Lootable goods
- Natural resource curse
- Point-source and diffuse-source resources
- Predatory state
- Staple theory