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A growing literature links oil to conflict, particularly civil war. Greed/opportunity, grievance, and weak state arguments have been advanced to explain this relationship. This chapter builds on the literature on oil and conflict in two important ways. First, I examine a novel dependent variable, domestic terrorism. Much is known about the effect of oil on the onset, duration, and intensity of civil war, though we know surprisingly little about the potential influence of oil on smaller, more frequent forms of violence. Second, I treat oil ownership as a variable, not a constant, coding oil rents based on ownership structure. This is contrary to other related studies that assume oil is necessarily owned by the state. Using a large, cross-national sample of states from 1971 to 2007, several key findings emerge. Notably, publicly owned oil exhibits a positive effect on domestic terrorism. This positive effect dissipates, however, when political performance and state terror are controlled for. Privately owned oil, on the other hand, does not correlate with increased incidences of terror. This suggests that oil is not a curse, per se.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

While much of the debate and discourse on sustainability and environmentally friendly practices have focused on privately owned and operated organizations, enterprises owned by the state have escaped scrutiny. This study focuses specifically on the oil and gas sector to explore the drivers that propel state-owned oil and gas producers, the national oil companies, to embrace sustainability practices. We find that the proportion of independent directors, international exposure, and international involvement influence sustainability practices.

We examine the effect of firm ownership status on three environmentally relevant variables: energy efficiency, toxic emissions, and spending on pollution abatement. Prior research has demonstrated that public firms invest less than private firms and suggests this difference is due pressure from investors to strongly favor short over long-term earnings. We extend this logic to other firm behavior, examining whether publicly owned facilities invest in energy efficiency and pollution reduction differently than privately owned facilities. Using data from the US Census of Manufactures from 1980 to 2009, information on pollution from the Environmental Protection Agency Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) and pollution abatement spending from the Pollution Abatement Costs and Expenditures survey, we find that facilities switching to public ownership are less energy efficient and spend less on pollution abatement than their privately owned counterparts. However, we also find that facilities switching to public ownership have lower toxic emissions than other facilities. We also examine how different sources of external pressures alter these results and find that increased regulatory scrutiny is correlated with increased energy efficiency, toxic emissions, and abatement spending. More concentrated institutional ownership in public firms is associated with lower energy efficiency as is a greater brand focus. These latter results are broadly consistent with the idea that publicly owned firms respond to pressures from investors with a reduced focus on environmentally relevant variables. However, since facilities switching to public ownership have lower toxic emissions, this suggests that there are two competing pressures in publicly owned facilities: cost pressures, consistent with lowered energy efficiency, and public perceptions, consistent with lower toxic emissions, particularly since TRI data became available. In this sense, the combination of ownership and transparency of information appears to influence how firms prioritize different stakeholders.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

This paper looks at state-owned enterprises (SOEs) from the angle of the market for corporate control and analyzes in detail the reported rationales of a sample of 355 mergers and acquisition (M&A) deals performed by SOEs as acquirers over the period 2002-2012. The purpose of this paper, after having created a taxonomy of deal motivations, is to empirically test two alternative hypotheses: deviation vs convergence of M&A deal rationales between state-owned and private enterprises.

The data set is obtained by combining firm-level information from two sources, Zephyr and Orbis (Bureau Van Dijk). A recursive algorithm is developed to infer the ownership nature of the enterprises at the time the deal took place and then the authors double-checked the identity of the global ultimate owner by visual inspection of all the available information. Motivations are analyzed through a case-by-case analysis and classified into several categories, thereby providing a taxonomy of rationales behind SOE M&As and discussing their differences and similarities relative to private firms.

More than 60 percent of the deals performed by SOEs as acquirers are driven by “shareholder value maximization” motives, similarly to private enterprise acquirers. The other 40 percent of deals are almost equally spread among three rationales that specifically relate to the role of modern state capitalism in the economy. “Financial distress” motivation, which is the only one clearly deviating from the objectives of profit maximization typical of private ownership, is far less important than the others.

The paper does not analyze the case studies in detail. Neither does it correlate the evidence with the quality of corporate governance or the quality of institutions in the country. This would be interesting in order to discover whether the alignment of objectives between public and private enterprises is enhanced by certain features of public sector management, as suggested by the OECD (2015) Guidelines.

The paper suggests some policy implications in terms of reforms of the corporate governance of the SOEs and accountability of their management against clearly stated public missions. It also calls for the need for citizens to be informed in a transparent way about the rationales of major M&A deals when a SOE is on the acquirer side, and the consistency of such rationales with the mission assigned by governments to the enterprises they own. Finally, it underlines that regulatory concerns raised in many countries by the rise of cross-border SOE M&As are in most of the cases unfounded.

Existing literature has mainly focused on private corporate M&A deals or has just disregarded the ownership status of the acquiring firm. This paper focuses on the motivations for SOE deals in order to elaborate a taxonomy of SOE deal rationales and to identify the differences and similarities between private corporate firms.

We discuss the ways in which the tensions between deregulation and bailouts create fundamentally inefficient markets. Although there is an appetite for the rhetoric of a laissez-fair economic system in the United States, we do not have the political will to operate such a system, as there are always cries for bailouts when a crisis emerges. And bailouts rob markets of the crucial ability to discipline capital for risky behavior. Using the case of China as an example, we argue that the post-Cold War conclusion that state ownership is fundamentally inefficient is premature. The key issue is not state versus private ownership per se but, rather, how well aligned the incentives are within a given system. Some of the economic models we find in reform-era China are actually better aligned and perhaps as transparent as their counterparts in the market economies of the capitalist West. Finally, because China is not caught up on the categorical assumption that private firms are efficient while state-owned firms are inefficient, the country has been able to be an institutional innovator in the area of public–private partnerships, leading to radical new corporate forms.

This study aims to explore the effect of Saudi Vision 2030 and its government initiatives on macroeconomic variables related to housing.

This exploratory study used an empirical–analytical approach. Based on secondary data, a set of hypotheses was contrasted to verify whether there has been any change in the trends of macroeconomic variables related to housing after Saudi Vision 2030 entered into force.

The results show that the trend of percentage of housing ownership went from a continuous decrease to accelerated growth since the implementation of Saudi Vision 2030. However, the effect of these advances is not observed in non-oil gross domestic product (GDP) or in the economic activities of the construction, real estate and financial services sectors.

This study notes that despite successful housing outcomes, it appears that Saudi Vision 2030 does not have a positive impact on non-oil GDP. Consequently, government entities should review the degree to which other economic activities contribute to non-oil GDP. A limitation of the study was that the GDP of housing construction and marketing and that of granting mortgage loans were not specifically available, nor were data on public and private investment made for implementing government initiatives.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the effect of Saudi Vision 2030 on housing and its contribution to the economy.