Prof. Yates Publishes Chapter on the Rise and Fall of Oil-rentier States in Africa

Professor Yates has published a chapter entitled "The Rise and Fall of Oil-Rentier States in Africa" in New Approaches to the Governance of Natural Resources: Insights from Africa (J. Andrew Grart, W.R. Nadège Compaoré and Matthew I. Mitchell, eds., Palgrave MacMillan 2015).

This book demonstrates the resurgent economic and geopolitical importance of Africa evidenced by the growing investment by China, India, the United States, Brazil, and other countries in the sub-continents natural resources such as oil, biofuels, forestry, fisheries, and minerals.

Yates' chapter covers the oil industry, using the theory of the rentier state as a template to compare the oil-dependency, inequality, a corrupt rentier mentality, enclave industrialization, decline of agriculture, high vulnerability to oil price shocks, and a long chain of causation, surprisingly negative, coming out of what appears at fist to be a blessing of oil revenues. Ultimately, Yates concludes, "the decline and fall of oil-rentier states will be the unintended consequence of their regimes living off unearned oil revenues, instead of attending to the genuine developmental needs of their domestic populations." (p. 62)

See book on publisher's website