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 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...

Twenty-first century authoritarian regimes manage and deter dissent in less overt forceful ways than in the past, instead using more creative methods for repression of those that oppose them. Some argue that information and communication technologies can provide new opportunities for...

The oil price shock that began in mid-2014 has continued to reverberate in Azerbaijan, sending the economy into deep recession and negative real GDP growth rate (-2.4 percent in 2016). Declining volumes of oil production, which peaked at 1 million barrels a day (b/d) in 2010, and impending...

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...

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...

This article looks at the impact of low oil prices and the resulting shortfall in oil rents on the Azerbaijani government's social-assistance policies and related expenditures and discusses its implications for social cohesion in the long run. It argues that the deployment of strategic fiscal...