Research Library

How can the U.S. government help the recovery of the post-transition Venezuelan oil and gas sector? The authors offer key recommendations.

Venezuela, which has one of the largest hydrocarbon endowments in the world, offers a striking case study on the resource curse, write Francisco Monaldi, Igor Hernández and José La Rosa. This working paper is part of a series titled “The Role of Foreign Direct Investment in Resource-Rich Regions.”

The authors evaluate Argentina’s energy sector and test the hypothesis that investments in tight oil and shale gas extraction expose investors to fewer risks than extracting conventional oil and gas. This working paper is part of a series titled “The Role of Foreign Direct Investment in Resource-Rich Regions.”

This paper examines the cash flow and financial issues affecting Venezuela’s PDVSA, as well as the operational challenges facing the country’s oil industry.

This working paper studies optimal taxation in a dynamic stochastic economy in which there is uncertainty about the effects of climate change. It concludes that model uncertainty has significant quantitative implications regarding optimal greenhouse gas emissions and the optimal mix of fossil fuel used.

Venezuela is a textbook example of a resource-dependent country. Nevertheless, Venezuela currently combines an economy that is stagnant, despite high oil prices, with an increasingly authoritarian government.

Latin America recently experienced a new wave of nationalization in the hydrocarbon sector with tax increases and the participation and control of the state. There is considerable variation in the specific policies that Latin American countries implemented, however.

The political institutions that established Venezuela's democracy in the 1960s were deliberately set up to generate a cooperative equilibrium with low stakes of power. The recent political reforms, increasing the stakes of power, have stimulated a complete breakdown in cooperation and a highly polarized political system.