Teymur Khalafov

t.khalafov.1@research.gla.ac.uk

 

Research title: Natural Resource Funds (NRFs) in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan - unexpected efficiency

Research Summary

The two main functions of any Natural Resource Fund (NRF) are to use the accumulated resource revenues to stabilise the budget expenditure of the resource-exporting country in times of low resource prices and to save the excess revenue for future generations. In theory, by doing this, NRFs should also be able to mitigate the economic and political effects of the phenomenon referred to as the resource curse. But the question of the efficiency of NRFs in achieving this objective, specifically in the case of developing exporter states, has long been a point of discussion. There are strong arguments that the institutional and governance weaknesses of the developing exporters (where state-building coincides with the beginning of the resource exploitation) mean that their NRFs are generally inefficient in mitigating the economic and political effects that arise due to the resource curse.

My PhD focuses on the case studies of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and attempts to provide new insights to our understanding of how NRFs function in institutionally developing environments while also analysing what specific circumstances have led to the emergence of an unexpected efficiency within the NRFs in these countries and how durable it is.

Supervisors

Conference

BASEES Annual Conference in Cambridge, UK (5 - 7 April, 2024)

  • Presentation title: The Natrual Resouce Funds (NRFs) in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan: Unexpected efficiency

 

17th ASIAC Annual Conference in Rome, Italy (14 - 16 December, 2023)

  • Presentation title: The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) in the Post-Oil era: Save or Spend?

 

22nd Annual Aleksanteri Conference in Helsinki, Finland (25 - 27 October, 2023)

  • Presentation title: The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ): From Spending to Reforms

 

Teaching

PhD (Student) Tutor during the 2023/24 academic year for the following undergraduate level courses:

  • CEES 1A: Central and Eastern Europe in the Age of Stalin
  • CEES 1B: Communism and its Collapse