China’s global quest for resources, in particular oil and natural gas, has received unprecedented worldwide attention and scrutiny. This is partly because of China’s own high-profile, active energy diplomacy, its national oil companies’ acquisitions in the key exporting regions of oil and...

China’s emerging standing in the world demands a major rethinking of its diplomatic strategies. Given its population size, geographical scale, economic power and military presence, China is poised to play a larger political role in the twenty-first century, and is thus perceived by the...

The aim of this paper is to provide an assessment of the potential for resource curse in the renewable energy sector. Taking a political economy approach, we analyze the link between public support schemes for renewable energy and the potential scope for rent seeking and corruption. The insights...

Recent research has emphasized the influence of colonization on the institutional development and economic performance in former European colonies. Where European colonizers settled, they replicated the investment-conducive institutions found at home. It has been argued that a harsh disease...

In this paper, we empirically investigate a channel through which social capital may improve economic wellbeing and the functioning of institutions: political accountability. The main idea is that voters who share norms of generalized morality demand higher standards of behavior on their elected...

International organizations promote privatization as precondition for economic development. But is there really too little privatization? This political economy model asks for the incentives of governments to privatize or restructure a state-owned firm. Different government types are compared to...

The topic of corruption has recently attracted a great deal of attention, yet there is still a lack of micro level empirical evidence regarding the determinants of corruption. Furthermore, the present literature has not investigated the effects of political interest on corruption despite the...

Citizens are willing to abandon their short-term financial interest in free-riding considerably, if governments act in their interest, if procedures of the public decisions-making process are felt to be fair and if other fellow-citizens have to contribute also an adequate share to the community....

We explore theoretically and empirically whether social interaction, including local and global interaction, influences the incidence of corruption. We first present an interaction-based model on corruption that predicts that the level of corruption is positively associated with social...