Azerbaijan’s social assistance and income support schemes adopted during the Covid-19 pandemic need to be seen within the context of the country’s existing social protection system and safety nets. While the existing system is operational and has the technical capacity to respond and deliver...

The article delineates the major national, regional and international level stakeholders in the westward Trans-Caspian transportation of Kazakh oil, supplemented with a discussion of the prospect of expansion of the Trans-Caspian/South Caucasus corridor in light of the presumably harmful effect...

Azerbaijan's democratization attempts failed, not least because for those in power, control over the political process was essential in order to gain and maintain control over the country's petroleum riches. Organization of power along patrimonial lines defines the system that Azerbaijan's late...

The oil price shock that began in mid-2014 has continued to reverberate in Azerbaijan, sending the economy into deep recession and negative real GDP growth rate (-2.4 percent in 2016). Declining volumes of oil production, which peaked at 1 million barrels a day (b/d) in 2010, and impending...

This article looks at the impact of low oil prices and the resulting shortfall in oil rents on the Azerbaijani government's social-assistance policies and related expenditures and discusses its implications for social cohesion in the long run. It argues that the deployment of strategic fiscal...

A number of studies in the academic and policy literature suggest that resource-rich countries with democratic political systems are more likely than their resource-rich counterparts with less democratic systems to enjoy prudential governance of natural resources, which, in turn, makes inclusive...

Despite the officially stated goal of economic diversification and the billions of petrodollars in government expenditure, Azerbaijan has made slow progress achieving non-oil growth and remains heavily dependent on oil revenues. Why have Azerbaijan's efforts to reduce dependence on energy export...

This article looks at various estimates of the scale and composition of the informal economy in Azerbaijan, focusing on the extent and structure of informal employment. It shows that informal economic activity makes up a considerable part of the country's GDP and that the share of informal...