Browse

After over two decades of prolonged economic growth, Spain suffered its worst economic crisis in decades between 2008 and 2014. The political, social, and economic consequences of this crisis were very severe: unemployment increased sharply reaching over 27 per cent; inequalities deepened; and the two-party political system was transformed by the emergence of new parties. The implementation of structural reforms, which intensified as a result of the European Union financial sector bailout of 2012, led to economic recovery. As a result, credit was restored, strong economic growth resumed, and the political system did not implode. Yet, persistently high unemployment (particularly as regards youth and long-term) as well as inequality (and to a certain extent poverty) still persist a decade after the crisis. This chapter looks at the genesis of the crisis and examines the responses to the crisis, as well as its economic, social, and political consequences.

This chapter is an exploration of the relations between the country’s ecology, environmental governance, and political economy. It is structured around several themes. First, an analysis of one of Nigeria’s major environmental ecological challenges—the fate of Nigeria’s forests. A second theme places Nigeria’s current environment problems on a larger historical landscape. A third explores the relations between the rise of Nigeria as a petrostate and its calamitous consequences for Nigeria’s environment. And a final section examines two regional insurgencies: the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) in the oil-producing Niger Delta; and Boko Haram in the northern drought-prone savannas. These two episodes of violent politics shed light on the relations between environment, resources, and Nigeria’s political economy; how questions of access to and control over resources and the environment enter into the often violent dynamics of postcolonial Nigerian politics and power.

This chapter analyses several interrelated processes of economic development, social modernization, and demographic change in Spanish society from 1978 to the present. In this period, the country adopted several of the basic demographic patterns characteristic of post-transitional societies, including increased control over mortality and fertility, a large inflow of migrants, slow or even negative rates of natural growth, and a rapidly ageing population. At the same time, and fuelled in part by the dividends of this demographic transformation, a process of general convergence with other developed economies has taken place: sectoral change and occupational change transformed the distribution of the labour force and consolidated a service economy in which the new middle classes of highly educated professionals and technicians have thrived. Despite the ups and downs of the business cycle, these processes of societal change have improved the overall living standard of Spanish society.

This chapter analyses the institutional, political, and economic determinants of the main dimensions of economic policy in contemporary Spain in the hands of domestic policy-makers: fiscal and regulatory policies. It describes its effects on redistribution, and analyses its variation across the ideological leanings of governments and across time, paying special attention to how the Spanish economy has coped with the Great Recession. The last sections advance an explanation for the main features of Spanish economic policy-making by analysing the supply-side (institutional) and demand-side (political-economy) constraints in which it operates, and suggests possible implications for how it will evolve in the near future.

This chapter examines energy governance in Brazil. It shows that energy security, defined in terms of national security and economic modernization, historically played a significant role in shaping debates on Brazilian political economy. State-owned enterprises were created, notably Petrobras in oil and gas and Eletrobras in power generation, to respond to growing energy consumption and the country’s industrial ambitions. Ethanol politics, on the other hand, was shaped by contending interests of sugar producers as they negotiated and bargained with the Brazilian state. Despite efforts to open the energy market for private competition, the state remains an important player. Privatization has been limited and heavily guided by the state. The Brazilian state emphasizes the strategic nature of energy and has remained key in securing its energy needs and attempts at energy diversification. Future studies should focus on how far the state is willing to rely on market mechanisms to develop the energy sector as well as explore the link between energy security and national development.

Japanese energy policy has attracted renewed attention since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. However, Japan’s energy challenges are nothing new; as a country poor in natural resources, it has long struggled to meet its energy needs. This chapter provides an overview of Japanese energy politics, focusing on three broad topics: Japan’s modernization and energy security challenges, the politics of the utilities sector and nuclear energy, and the politics of energy conservation and climate change. In addition, the chapter discusses factors specific to Japan, such as state-business relations in the utilities sector and institutional changes since the 1990s. Japan offers both compelling puzzles—several transformative shifts in energy conservation policy, limited emphasis on renewables despite persistent energy security concerns, and reinvigoration of nuclear energy despite the Fukushima disaster—as well as important empirical opportunities for theory testing. The chapter concludes by calling for additional research that integrates insights from Japan into broader theoretical and cross-national scholarship, examines Japanese energy policy within an international context, and uses rigorous causal identification strategies to evaluate Japanese energy policy. Finally, it identifies the politics of decarbonization in Japan as a critical area for future research.

Venezuela is essential for global energy politics because it has the largest oil reserves in the world. Historically the nation has been a significant producer, but from 2013 onward it became immersed in a deep crisis. This chapter discusses the transformation of Venezuela attributed to oil extraction, the complexities of the political configurations molded by rent distribution, and the changes in sociocultural features due to the permeation of oil rents. Venezuela’s dependence on oil has often been explained through the “resource curse thesis” due to its incapacity to assure the benefits of the commodity-led growth model and to invest in activities that foster long-term development. Political science scholarship, specifically, has been most concerned with the use of oil wealth to shape state and society and with the relationship between the state and the oil industry in Venezuela, especially its national oil company, PDVSA. These arguments account for a paradoxical mismatch between Venezuela’s promise as producer and its indebted and inefficient oil industry during Bolivarian Revolution, led first by Hugo Chávez and later by Nicolás Maduro.

Through cycles of civilian and military government, Nigeria’s political leadership has prioritized gaining access to revenue in order to distribute resources via patronage systems. As a result, the desire of elites to access the primary mode of revenue generation motivates political choices to centralize power in the national government or disperse authority through the federal system. This chapter provides an overview of how political and fiscal federalism have evolved in postcolonial Nigeria. Up until the Fourth Republic, the central government has dominated revenue extraction and policymaking, all at the cost of subnational autonomy and institutional capability. More contemporarily, as we see subnational governments strengthening their capacity to mobilize non-oil income (via taxation), state and local governments could potentially reassert their autonomy in Nigeria’s political system.

This chapter explores the history and challenges of fiscal policy in Nigeria. It examines fiscal policy since independence in 1960 up until contemporary times. It explores the transition from an agriculture and trade-dominated government to the rise of crude oil as an important and dominating part of government revenues, and the subsequent effects the boom and bust of the crude oil commodity cycles have had. The chapter cycles through the conditions that led to the first oil boom and crash in the late 1970s, the difficult decades of adjustments that followed, and the fiscal reforms enacted during the democratic years. The chapter examines strategies that have been put in place at various points in time and explores the risks for fiscal policy going forward.

Petroleum has been key to Nigeria’s political economy since the 1970s, giving rise to a syndrome called the “resource curse.” This includes a revenue monoculture, procyclical policies, endemic corruption, political uncertainty, communal tensions, and heightened conflict. The resource curse concept is organized around shifting elite bargains for the mediation of state-controlled rents. Analyses of the resource curse emphasize structural continuity, yet the syndrome is not immutable, as political interests and institutions may lead to different outcomes. Nigeria’s two petroleum booms illustrate the influence of political factors. Both were framed by abrupt windfalls, volatility, and equally sudden declines in revenue. While the first boom culminated in prolonged economic decline, the second was followed by transient recession and resilient performance in the non-oil economy. This chapter argues that electoral politics and civic participation have shifted elite incentives toward more responsive policies, though these factors are insufficient to shift the political settlement toward an inclusive developmental model.

Israel’s political economy has been transformed since the 1980s from a developmental to a neoliberal model. This chapter describes and explains this transformation, emphasizing the unevenness and incompleteness of liberalization and its impact on socioeconomic inequality. Adopting a historical-institutionalist perspective to explain both the rise of Israeli neoliberalism and its unevenness, the chapter argues that liberalization was led by economic technocrats in state agencies, who were guided by liberal economic ideas and simultaneously pursuing their interest in greater authority and autonomy. The technocrats were empowered by re-engineering economic policy institutions and cooperating with other political actors. However, their ability to fulfill the goal of technocratic management of a competition-driven economy was limited by the continuing power of some sectors of both business and labor and the continuing vibrancy of the state’s national and military projects. The conclusion discusses recent challenges to neoliberalism in Israel as a result of public discontent and conflict between state actors.

This article examines the institutional foundations of the remarkable growth of the Chinese economy, paying particular attention to official incentives, institutional constraints, and local developmentalism. It begins by outlining two approaches that explain the role of local officials as agents of economic growth: the fiscal incentives approach, which views local officials as revenue maximizers; and the fiscal federalism approach, which views officials as promotion maximizers. It then discusses the tournament thesis based on Chinese policy and empirical data before proposing a three-pronged framework that analyzes China’s political economy and explains why the country’s revenue-maximizing local officials have pursued a particular form of developmentalism since the early 1990s. This framework takes into account a number of phenomena in China’s economic development and transition, including massive industrialization and urbanization, local protectionism, the privatization of state-owned enterprises, and the rise of TVEs (township and village enterprises).

Tax and revenue have shaped and reshaped Nigeria’s administration, institutions, and practices and informed the way that governance and power have been created and understood by ordinary people. This chapter traces that journey from colonial experiments, through agricultural boom and bust, then to oil-reliance and centralization, and afterwards to the renegotiations involved in the transition back to democracy, before concluding in an examination of contemporary Nigeria. Today the country finds itself in a situation where the federal government and states alike are searching for new sources of revenue as oil prices slump, provoking new negotiations of the social contracts between government and citizens.

This chapter analyzes the dysfunctions of Nigeria’s oil sector, often framed as the “resource curse.” The resource curse thesis has for long been employed to explain the developmental challenges of veteran oil and mineral exporters such as Nigeria. This chapter examines the weaknesses of the resource curse thesis especially its commodity determinism, and argues for a political economy approach for a more encompassing understanding of the political constraints to reforming Nigeria’s oil sector. Using a political settlements framework, the chapter argues that the horizontal elite, vertical societal, and external constraints on successive ruling elites generate suboptimal policy choices for the oil industry. These political constraints generate competitive, distributional, and fiscal pressures from key stakeholders on Nigeria’s ruling elite towards these suboptimal policy choices. The analysis here covers the twenty-first century, from 1999, when Nigeria transitioned to electoral democracy.