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Defying the Resource Curse: Explaining Successful State-Owned Enterprises in Rentier States
- World Politics
- Cambridge University Press
- Volume 62, Number 2, April 2010
- pp. 261-301
- 10.1017/s0043887110000055
- Article
- Additional Information
The article explains how several Gulf rentier monarchies have managed to create highly profitable and well-managed state-owned enterprises (soe s), confounding expectations of both general soe inefficiency and the particularly poor quality of rentier public sectors. It argues that a combination of two factors explains the outcome: the absence of a populist-mobilizational history and substantive regime autonomy in economic policy-making. The author concludes that it is necessary to rethink the commonly accepted generalizations both about rentier states and, arguably, about public sectors in the developing world.