Azerbaijan’s social assistance and income support schemes adopted during the Covid-19 pandemic need to be seen within the context of the country’s existing social protection system and safety nets. While the existing system is operational and has the technical capacity to respond and deliver...

The present paper examines both domestic and international actors, involved in the westward oil shipment of Kazakhstani oil, and their interests. It demonstrates that while foreign companies have been backed by their governments, national firms have also enjoyed considerable state support,...

The recent resource curse literature suggests that oil promotes authoritarian regime stability. Yet the causal linkages underpinning the political resource curse remain less well understood. Using a case study of Azerbaijan, this article first examines how oil revenues benefited the existing...

European energy policy faces challenges. Among these are gas supply security and competitiveness of the gas market. Gas supply security is at risk from presently high and increasing European import dependence on a limited number of large foreign suppliers, notably Sonatrach, Statoil and Gazprom....

This article discusses several mechanisms by which oil wealth has sustained authoritarian rule in Azerbaijan. While the prevailing focus on patronage spending and repression is undoubtedly accurate, it is nevertheless incomplete because it does not account for oil's adverse effects that can...

The article delineates the major national, regional and international level stakeholders in the westward Trans-Caspian transportation of Kazakh oil, supplemented with a discussion of the prospect of expansion of theTrans-Caspian/SouthCaucasus corridor in light of the presumably harmful effect of...

This article looks at various estimates of the scale and composition of the informal economy in Azerbaijan, focusing on the extent and structure of informal employment. It shows that informal economic activity makes up a considerable part of the country's GDP and that the share of informal...

Despite the officially stated goal of economic diversification and the billions of petrodollars in government expenditure, Azerbaijan has made slow progress achieving non-oil growth and remains heavily dependent on oil revenues. Why have Azerbaijan's efforts to reduce dependence on energy export...