Drawing on comparative resource curse literature and American literature on the determinants of corruption, we argue that the impact of natural resource extraction on corruption outcomes is state-dependent. That is, in environments where corruption is already high, natural resource windfalls allow political actors and economic elites to take advantage of state brokerage, further increasing corruption. However, in previously less-corrupt states, increased natural resource extraction will not induce corruption. We rely on hierarchical linear models to interpret federal corruption convictions data for the fifty American states between 1976 and 2012 and employ generalized method of moments estimators to account for potential endogeneity. The findings are robust to alternative specifications and have implications for the management of new resource extraction opportunities.

This chapter adds a case study of Ireland’s experience with FDI, as a complement to the cross-national investigations of preceding chapters. By considering a single country and its policies and institutions through time, this chapter adds context and policy relevance to the larger claims of the book. Ireland’s potential example for developing countries is considered, as well as its limitations. While Ireland has attracted a large amount of FDI since the 1990s, the country has not consistently exhibited innovation-intensive investment patterns. This chapter empirically examines the investment models adopted by firms in Ireland, and connects these strategies to the history of investment promotion and institutional development. This chapter demonstrates that institutions in Ireland did not until recently prioritize multinational embeddedness in the local economy, and that policymakers missed opportunities for innovation-intensive forms of investment. This chapter utilizes firm surveys, and also considers government support for innovation and domestic linkages. The chapter also contains a discussion of the possible implications of the Irish case.

This chapter provides the theoretic background and working hypotheses for the empirical tests that follow in subsequent chapters. The book is informed by substantial literature in several academic subfields, including but not limited to international political economy, international business studies, development economics, and global value chain research. This chapter builds a cumulative theoretic framework for interpreting multinational innovation and comparative institutionalist perspectives. Prior literature and debate inform the hypotheses presented in this chapter, which involve both country and firm level attributes and resulting investment patterns. The chapter considers ideas from international development studies regarding the role of multinational firms in processes of country growth and technological upgrading, theories of the firm and contemporary pressures for polycentric innovation models, and institutionalist perspectives from political science and political economy. This chapter also provides working definitions for key concepts and how institutions might be analytically separated from host country policies. The chapter emphasizes the theoretic support for the causal mechanisms supposed in the various hypotheses.

Ryan Saylor, State Building in Boom Times: Commodities and Coalitions in Latin America and Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Tables, bibliography, index, 244 pp.; hardcover $44.46. - Volume 58 Issue 1