The global coalition of oil cursed citizens: July 2009

Any moment the State receives more than 4% of GDP in fiscal income directly from any extractive industry or similar, then the State has become too independently wealthy and the balance of powers needs to be restored by paying out all exceeding revenues directly to the citizens.

Where I come from

I was named Diversification Manager in the Venezuela Investment Fund that was created in 1974 to handle the oil income surpluses of the nation.

I entered the Fund its very first day, and I left a couple of weeks later, the same day my desk arrived, utterly frustrated when the Fund was requested to analyze, and obviously endorse, in just four days, the economic feasibility studies of a 4 billion dollar investment known as the Fourth Plan of SIDOR, the big Venezuelan iron and steel complex.

With an “if something goes wrong with this project the Venezuelans might have the right to hang us in Plaza Bolívar, and I’m much too young for that” I slammed the door on the public sector … for the following 28 years... except for a short two year stint as an Executive Director in the World Bank.

I have lived through two immense oil revenue bonanzas in my country and I am absolutely convinced that when the oil revenues a government receives exceed 5% of the nations GDP, or 15% of its exports, or 25% of all taxes paid by citizens, the balance of power is so fundamentally affected that bad governance and bad citizenship becomes the major malignant symptoms of the oil-curse.

There is not one single word or idea that I hear today from politicians, or from well-intentioned groups of mostly non-oil-cursed professionals as in EITI or the Resource-Charter, and that I have not heard before with respect to making better use of oil revenues.

The only route to go is keeping the oil revenues from the politicians and giving these directly to the citizens in an orderly fashion.

The global coalition of oil cursed citizens

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

The frontier of curse-land

Where I come from

Down with the Oiligarchs!

Down with the Petrocrats!

Kings and beggars

In Venezuela

21st Century Asocialism

Voices and documents:

Blog Archive