Reference no: EM132865992

Saudi Arabia and many other wealthy, yet still "developing," oil-producing states produce a great deal of oil for export to the world's industrializing economies, and consume a great deal of oil at home as part of their own development. Oil is often heavily subsidized for domestic consumption and used very inefficiently, as with Saudi Arabia's use of oil for over half its electrical generation (Links to an external site.). These use patterns and the centrality of oil to the economies and societies of these countries creates phenomena that social scientists like to study and classify. Many of these analysts, such as Michael Ross at the University of California at Los Angeles (Links to an external site.), have created the "resource curse" concept to describe maladies and pitfalls of these societies, often forgetting that both the US and the Soviet Union were and still are large oil producers.

Question 1: Are developing countries with abundant oil resources cursed? Are their societal, economic, and political structures doomed to be malformed and detrimental to their own populations?

Question 2: What role do foreign actors play, if any, in these processes (e.g., states like Russia, the US, and Britain, and oil majors like ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell or China's CNOOC)?