Research articles (South African-German Centre for Development Research and Criminal Justice)
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Item Resource rents, savings behavior, and scenarios of economic development(Elsevier Ltd, 2023) Sadik-Zada, Elkhan R.The paper revisits the nexus between natural resources and economic growth from the lens of development economics. It augments the traditional dual-sector economy model by the assumption that in addition to capitalists, also workers contribute to the capital accumulation through private savings out of their wage income. The proposed differential game theory model of the interaction between the public and the elites identifies two realistic open loop Nash and three Stackelberg scenarios for the management of the commodity driven budget surplus. Based on the conventional transversality conditions, the model detects a progressing decay of social cohesion and institutional quality. It shows that at the early stages of the exploitation of the natural resource riches, both the public and elites enable a rather modernization-friendly scenarios. At the rather advanced stages of the exploitation of natural resources both groups try to maximize their short-term private benefits and by doing so protract or even inhibit the process of economic modernization. The study finds that the savings behavior of the workers has a positive modernization effect. Nevertheless, workers’ savings cannot fully offset the negative modernization effects of the inferior management of natural resource revenues.Item Drivers of CO2-Emissions in Fossil Fuel abundant settings: (Pooled) mean group and nonparametric panel analyses(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), 2020) Sadik-Zada, Elkhan Richard; Loewenstein, WilhelmThe present inquiry addresses the income-environment relationship in oil-producing countries and scrutinizes the further drivers of atmospheric pollution in the respective settings. The existing literature that tests the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis within the framework of the black-box approaches provides only a bird’s-eye perspective on the long-run income-environment relationship. The aspiration behind this study is making the first step toward the disentanglement of the sources of carbon dioxide emissions, which could be employed in the pollution mitigation policies of this group of countries. Based on the combination of two strands of literature, the environmental Kuznets curve conjecture and the resource curse, the paper at hand proposes an augmented theoretical framework of this inquiry.Item Privatization and the role of sub-national governments in the Latin American power sector: A plea for less subsidiarity?(International Journal of Energy Economics and Policy (IJEEP), 2018) Sadik-Zada, Elkhan Richard; Löwenstein, Wilhelm; Ferrari, MattiaIn this paper, we explore the cross-national impact of privatization in the network industries on the access to network services. We focus on the assessment of the electricity sector in 20 Latin American countries and analyze the time series between 1985 and 2010. To control for the relevance of the subsidiarity (social commons) argument (Byrne and Mun, 2001; 2003) we assess the interaction between commodification and the role of the sub-national governments in the power sector. Privatization has a statistically significant positive effect on the level of electricity access. In the absence of federalism, privatization in the electricity sector has a greater impact on electrification than in the case with federalist government system. Federalism has a positive impact on the electricity access if electricity is generated and supplied mainly by the state-owned enterprises. Another interesting finding is the relationship between the degree of subsidiarity and electrification: A higher the degree of subsidiarity has a negative effect on the electrification. This could be a result of the increasing transaction costs and rent-seeking behavior in the decentralized settings. The study complements the existing literature by analyzing the privatization reform from the subsidiarity perspective.Item Recovering the stolen assets: Understanding gatekeeper's activities(2011-08-15) Utama, PakuThis paper identifies the link between gatekeepers and corruption, and examines how money laundering mechanisms are used to conceal the proceeds of corruption. In order to successfully trace and recover stolen assets, we need to understand how gatekeepers utilize various money laundering mechanisms and offshore financial centres. This writing highlights how gatekeepers operating in the private sector, wittingly or unwittingly, use their expert knowledge of the international financial system to facilitate corruption by helping corrupt leaders legitimate, secure, and obfuscate the movement of the proceeds of corruption within the global banking system. It also looks at potential alternative responses to further curb gatekeeper’s roles in the money laundering process.