Oil and Freedom: The Inverse Correlation

Friends of Atlas involved with the Free Minds Association in Azerbaijan and the Azeri Web site, write about “Oil Hegemony” — explaining that booming oil revenues tend to make governments less accountable. If you read Azeri, you can read the whole thing here.‚ In the meantime, here are a couple key quotes translated to English:

Oil has started playing its complex part in Azerbaijan´s political and economic life. It would be safe to say that oil revenues are in inverse proportion to democracy  as revenues increase, the boundaries of democracy shrink…

The adverse impact of oil is that it reduces such incentive, makes the government complacent, weakens its dependence on public opinion and enables it to be negligent to its international obligations.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 8:27 AM. It is filed under Middle East and tagged with , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Comments Off to “Oil and Freedom: The Inverse Correlation”

  1. David Seymour says:
    August 6, 2008 at 8:03 PM

    This sounds very interesting, is there any chance of getting an English translation? My email is seymourd@fcpp.org

    David

  2. Gia Jandieri says:
    August 7, 2008 at 3:01 AM

    Privatize, privatize, privatize – the oil companies and all natural resources! Democracy is not a solution – it is a problem itself, especially in this case.
    Best wishes to Azeri Free Mind Guys!

  3. Kasia Rada says:
    August 7, 2008 at 10:26 AM

    Would be especially interesting put in the context of other countries as well. Check out yesterday’s NY Times article “As Iraq Surplus Rises, Little Goes Into Rebuilding” available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/world/middleeast/06surplus.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print