Freedom, Development, and Oil: Citizens’ Capital Accounts for Iraq

The success of a development policy may be measured on a number of different scales: for instance, its contribution to alleviation of poverty or to a more efficient use of a country’s resources. One such measurement is the enhancement of the social and political freedoms of the individuals concerned.2 Citizens Capital Accounts (CCAs)3 include promising features in this respect; in particular, this is so for a class of developing countries with oil economies and some of the other varieties of the “resource-curse.”4 Oil economies in developing countries have tended to go hand in hand with authoritarianism, high levels of corruption, and clientelism.5 Thus, the political and social freedoms of the citizens are not the victims of poverty as such, but of features of the social and political structures and institutions that characterize developing economies rich in oil. In recent years, international aid and development agencies, NGOs, and civil society initiatives have concentrated effort to design development policies conducive to equitable distribution of resource wealth in these countries and to institutional reform. Examples include conditionality and monitoring on investment by the World Bank; campaigns, research, and lobbying by Revenue Watch; and legal action for clean trade in natural resources.6