The Governor's solution : how Alaska's oil dividend could work in Iraq and other oil-rich countries : an oil-to-cash reader
Reliance on natural resource revenues, particularly oil, is often associated with bad governance, corruption, and poverty. Worried about the effect of oil on Alaska, Governor Jay Hammond had a simple yet revolutionary idea: let citizens have a direct stake. The Governor's Solution features his first-hand account that describes, with brutal honesty and piercing humour, the birth of the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend, which has been paid to each resident every year since 1982. Thirty years later, Hammond's vision is still influencing oil policies throughout the world. This reader, part of the Center for Global Development's Oil-to-Cash initiative, includes recent scholarly work examining Alaska's experience and how other oil-rich societies, particularly Iraq, might apply some of the lessons. It is as a powerful reminder that the combination of new ideas and determined individuals can make a tremendous difference --even in issues as seemingly complex and intractable as fighting the oil curse.
Inflation and Conflict in Iraq: The Economics of Shortages Revisited
Abstract Containing inflation has turned out to be one of the most challenging aspects of economic management in Iraq since the invasion in 2003. This paper posits that conventional as well as unconventional factors explain inflation dynamics in the recent past. We build a theoretical model based on the insights into the workings of socialist economies under supply shortages in Shleifer and Vishny model to help explain price dynamics. In the model, strategic behavior of the distribution monopolist results in fuel shortages, with implications for fuel and non-fuel inflation. A number of discrete adjustments of administered prices for fuel products since December 2005 offer an interesting experiment to help study this behavior using the Shleifer–Vishny model. Our estimates confirm presence of strategic behavior in price fuel price setting and show that inflation was influenced by shortages in fuel supplies and by violence.
Self-responsibility in health care/promotion: motivational factors.
This paper explores motivational factors at play in self-responsibility in health care and promotion. If people do not take responsibility for their health status, is it because they can not or will not? "Can" refers to the ability or skill to do something, while "will" refers to intention and effort. Each of these factors are analyzed in terms of their role as a cause of behavior in self-responsibility for the health status. Educational intervention to motivate self-responsibility is suggested as well as empirical research in how people attribute health outcomes.