 |
Its oil and gas wealth condemns it to economic instability,
social inequality and political authoritarianism |
|
|
Oil and gas played an important role in the Soviet economy, and
the collapse of oil prices in the 1980s is now widely cited as
one of the main factors precipitating the collapse of the USSR
in 1991
|
|
|
Resource curse advocates argue that the resulting liberalisation
in the 1990s was just a temporary phenomenon, and that Russian
democracy was doomed to fail once the oil price went back up
again |
|
|
Global experience strongly suggests that oil is bad for
democracy and bad for sustained economic growth |
|
|
There are no examples of a successful transition to democracy in
a country where oil generates more than one third of its export
earnings |
|
|
The tendency of oil revenues to delay modernisation; their use
to buy off social protest; or their use to
fund a repressive state apparatus |
