Oil and Gas — Following the Money

I want to let our readers know about a new report that I wrote, just published by the Soros Foundation and the Open Society Institute. It’s about the tricky politics of countries being wealthy in oil and gas and still ending up poor.

Anyone following current events in Bolivia knows that one of the most important issues here is the debate over how to develop the country’s huge reserves of natural gas. If the global economy is a poker game in which rich countries always end up with the winning hands, Bolivia’s gas is the only chance at three aces it may ever have.

In October of last year the people of Bolivia ousted the President over a proposed gas export deal to California that they didn’t believe would actually deliver any of the benefits past the rich and powerful. At the time the New York Times called the people of Bolivia “economically ignorant”. But Bolivians, looking at their own long history of being ripped off by foreign corporations, knew exactly what they were doing.

Here’s the article we published a few months ago on this story, The Curse of Wealth Under the Ground.

Here is the link to my new report, published this month by the good people at the Soros Foundation, which looks at how poor countries all over the world are dealing with the same issue as Bolivia – how do you make sure that wealth under the ground becomes money in the pockets of average citizens. It is called Following the Money and is currently featured on the Soros Foundation home page.

Once again the story of Bolivia is the story of poor nations all over the globe.