Hard Times in the Lands of Plenty by Benjamin Smith - 9780801472770

Hard Times in the Lands of PlentyOil Politics in Iran and Indonesia\nAuthor(s): Benjamin Smith\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Cornell University Press, United States\nImprint: Cornell University Press\nISBN-13: 9780801472770, 978-0801472770\nSynopsis\nThat natural resources can be a curse as well as a blessing is almost a truism in political analysis. In many late-developing countries, the \""resource curse\"" theory predicts, the exploitation of valuable resources will not result in stable, prosperous states but rather in their opposite. Petroleum deposits, for example, may generate so much income that rulers will have little need to establish efficient, tax-extracting bureaucracies, leading to shallow, poorly functioning administrations that remain at the mercy of the world market for oil. Alternatively, resources may be geographically concentrated, thereby intensifying regional, ethnic, or other divisive tensions.\n In Hard Times in the Land of Plenty, Benjamin Smith deciphers the p.