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May 01, 2008
Distribute Iraq's oil revenues directly to the public?
Not many entries lately - I have been finishing up an article on the role of networks in the construction of the Afghan state, and a paper on Iraqi resources for the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.
More on the latter paper - in particular - is still to come. However, one interesting link to flag up for now: I was very interested to read Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Arvind Subramanian's paper on "Addressing the Natural Resource Curse: An Illustration from Nigeria". They argue in favour of "directly distributing the oil revenues to the public", and suggest that - as well as Nigeria - Iraq could be a state in which this policy proved effective.
While their analysis is certainly not perfect - for example, Lindy Davies raises some issues with the account of causality in play in the paper - I do think that this is an interesting proposal, and potentially suggests a means to address some of the problems in Iraq.
More on this to follow...
Posted by jon_mendel at May 1, 2008 10:43 PM
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