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Review Essay
Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. By Timothy Mitchell. London: Verso, 2011. 288p. $26.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.
The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations. By Michael L. Ross. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. 312p. $29.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.
What is it about oil? Whereas one might think that countries that produce the world's energy have it good, much scholarship has come to the conclusion that countries that produce oil have it bad: they are worse off economically and politically than they would otherwise be. This counter-intuitive idea has become so widespread that the "resource curse" is often discussed in popular outlets, from Thomas Friedman to Stephen Colbert.1And yet scholarship is increasingly questioning whether this curse actually exists. After several decades of research on the topic, we still do not have a clear idea what it is about oil--if anything--that causes problems.
These two important books enter this debate from different perspectives and with different goals, and to understand their contributions it is helpful to have a clearer picture of the recent trajectory of work in this area. Modern scholarship on the idea that there might be a negative relationship between oil and economic and political development began in earnest in the 1980s, with important case studies of countries with these resources. In these early works, scholars tended to conclude that (contrary to traditional expectations about the benefits of having natural endowments like oil) the resources provided great challenges for countries' development.2
The idea that there might be a "resource curse" began to gain wide traction when scholars first systematically compared the experiences of resource-rich countries with countries that did not have these resources. This was the goal of the seminal initial studies that examined worldwide data to see if there was a statistically significant correlation between oil and various measures of economic and political development. On the economic side, the benchmark work was by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner, who showed that a high ratio of natural resource exports to GDP was correlated with lower growth, controlling for other factors.3And on the political side, the benchmark works were by Ross, who showed that this...