Abstract

Mark C. Thurber, David R. Hults

National oil companies (NOCs) often behave in strikingly different ways from one another and from private, international oil companies (IOCs). Given that NOCs control about three-quarters of world oil reserves by equity share, their variation in corporate strategy has important implications for the world oil market. The recently released book Oil and Governance: State-owned Enterprises and the World Energy Supply, which we co-edited (along with our colleague, David Victor) and contributed to, explores the variation among NOCs through 15 detailed case studies and several cross-cutting pieces. Building off the research in that book, our aim in this essay is to discuss the differences among NOCs in their approach to risk. 

As described by Nolan and Thurber in Chapter 4 of our book, the notion of risk encapsulates both the likelihood of a negative outcome (e.g., of drilling a dry hole) and the loss that such an outcome would entail (e.g., the investment in an exploration well). Risks are pervasive in the oil industry because of the enormous sums of money on the line and the significant uncertainty around whether investments will prove successful. In this article we suggest that the goals of the state and its tools of governance may cause an NOC to tend towards one of three types of behavior: risk avoidance, risk taking, or risk management. Each of these three approaches to risk, we find, can be useful or counterproductive for the state depending on the context.

It can be useful for an NOC to avoid risk, as Sonangol has done, if its government is highly dependent on oil revenue, but this approach usually means that it must allow IOCs to shoulder risks if the oil sector is to thrive. Intelligent risk taking by the NOC, on the other hand, can help build domestic technological capability and may be a reasonable approach if the government has less need to maximize hydrocarbon revenue in the short term. Finally, commercial risk management by the NOC may be an appropriate model where the NOC has developed some competitive advantages and its government has few remaining expectations for the NOC apart from revenue generation. There is no “right” or “wrong” approach to risk for NOCs in a general sense. The goal of each government and its NOC should be to make sure that the way the NOC takes, avoids, or manages risk is of benefit to both the country and the NOC itself.

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In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Alice finds herself running as fast as she can but not moving anywhere. The Red Queen explains to her 'Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.'

Such is the situation in global agriculture. Global demand for agricultural products continues to rise as population grows and people get richer. As they get richer, people have fewer babies but eat more. And they use a lot more energy, which is increasingly derived from agricultural products. Crop technologies have to move incredibly fast just to keep up. Remarkably, over the past 50 years they have, with yields (production per hectare of land) for most crops more than doubling since 1960, and real prices of food falling for most of the period. In many ways we have come to take continued yield growth for granted. But, as Lin and Huybers show elsewhere in this issue, there is increasing evidence that this growth has stalled in many regions.

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This paper looks at past and likely future agricultural growth and rural poverty reduction in the context of the overall Indian economy. The growth of India’s economy has accelerated sharply since the late 1980s, but agriculture has not followed suit. Rural population and especially the labor force are continuing to rise rapidly. Meanwhile, rural-urban migration remains slow, primarily because the urban sector is not generating large numbers of jobs in labor-intensive manufacturing. Despite a sharply rising labor productivity differential between non-agriculture and agriculture, limited rural-urban migration, and slow agricultural growth, urban-rural consumption, income, and poverty differentials have not been rising. Urban-rural spillovers have become important drivers of the rapidly growing rural non-farm sector—the sector now generates the largest number of jobs in India. Rural non-farm self-employment has become especially dynamic with farm households rapidly diversifying into the sector to increase income.

The growth of the rural non-farm sector is a structural transformation of the Indian economy, but it is a stunted one. It generates few jobs at high wages with job security and benefits. It is the failure of the urban economy to create enough jobs, especially in labor-intensive manufacturing, that prevents a more favorable structural transformation of the classic kind. Nevertheless, non-farm sector growth has allowed for accelerated rural income growth, contributed to rural wage growth, and prevented the rural economy from falling dramatically behind the urban economy. The bottling up of labor in rural areas, however, means that farm sizes will continue to decline, agriculture will continue its trend to feminization, and part-time farming will become the dominant farm model. Continued rapid rural income growth depends on continued urban spillovers from accelerated economic growth, and a significant acceleration of agricultural growth based on more rapid productivity and irrigation growth. Such an acceleration is also needed to satisfy the increasing growth in food demand that follows rapid economic growth and fast growth of per capita incomes.