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 theTrans-Caspian/SouthCaucasus corridor in light of the presumably harmful effect of...

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...

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 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...

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...

Why does ideology often fail to take hold in post-Soviet party politics where parties tend to be personalistic, patronage-based and clientelistic rather than programmatic? Moving beyond conventional theories of social cleavage and patrimonial legacies, this paper offers an alternative...

Twenty years ago on September 20th, Azerbaijan and a consortium of 11 oil companies representing six different countries signed a major production sharing agreement (PSA) that was dubbed the “contract of the century”. The oil project promised to make the host country's citizens rich and...