Friday, March 9th, 2012 Crude Ambitions: The Internationalization of Emerging Country NOCs

Description

Emerging country National Oil Companies (NOCs) have received increasing attention within and outside the scholarly community due to the recognition that they have played an increasingly dominant role in both the exploitation of petroleum reserves and the management of petroleum sectors in their own countries since the late 1960s. By the end of the 20th century, NOCs in the developing world alone numbered over 100 and accounted for over 70 percent of world oil production. What has been largely overlooked by those outside the petroleum industry, however, is that emerging country NOCs have also sought to increase their economic influence beyond their own borders. Over roughly the past three decades, but especially since the beginning of the 1990s, NOCs have increasingly sought to internationalize their operations. Their ambitions, however, have been realized with varied degrees of success. What explains this variation? The few accounts that exist to date focus on recent changes in the structural characteristics of the international oil industry. Based on preliminary research (with Jazmin Sierra, Brown University), I argue instead that success depends on domestic political conflict surrounding petroleum sector nationalization and the NOC’s managerial independence. Understanding why some NOCs are effectively able to become IOCs not only has significant policy implications, it contributes to growing theoretical skepticism regarding the so-called “resource curse.”

Pauline Jones Luong is currently Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Previously, she held faculty appointments at Yale and Brown University. She received her Ph.D. in 1998 from Harvard University, where she was an Academy Scholar from 1998-1999 and 2001-2002. Her primary research interests include: institutional origin and change; identity and conflict; the politics of economic development, and political extremism. Her empirical work focuses primarily on the former Soviet Union. She has published articles in several leading academic and policy journals, including the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Foreign Affairs, Politics and Society, Europe-Asia Studies, and Resources Policy. Her books include: Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Power, Perceptions, and Pacts (Cambridge University Press, 2002); The Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence (Cornell University Press, 2003); and most recently, Oil is Not a Curse: Ownership Structure and Institutions in Soviet Successor States (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Future research will explore secularism as a form of political extremism and will focus on countries with predominantly Muslim populations, including former Soviet Central Asia. Her research to date has been supported by several organizations and institutions, including the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the United States Institute of Peace, the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, the National Council on East European and Eurasian Research, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.