Political Risk In The International Oil And Gas Industry

In this book, the author draws upon his training in political science and experience as an energy consultant at Atlantis, Inc. It explores the conflicting interests of host and firm, and discusses the way firms use political risk analyses leads us to the issue of managing political risk.

This book examines the financial, legal and institutional strategies available to the international oil and gas industry to manage political and investment risk. The financial techniques for mitigating and allocating risk include corporate finance, joint ventures, and project finance. The legal techniques include production sharing agreements, profit sharing agreements, service contracts, bilateral investment treaties, and multilateral investment treaties. The institutional techniques include domestic courts, national constitutions, international arbitral tribunals, governmental and non-governmental regulatory agencies, alliances and energy diplomacy.This book traces the historical development of these techniques and their application in practice. The effectiveness with which companies manage political and investment risk is important for the financial sustainability of individual firms and the industry as whole. The real and perceived level of risk affects the level of exploration expenditures and therefore the balance between supply and demand, and the price of oil and natural gas. The search for a secure supply of oil and gas affects the political, military, and economic relations between countries. Consequently, every developed and developing country has placed energy policy at or near the top of its national priorities.

Because political events can determine the success or failure of an investment abroad, transnational companies must make every effort to analyze political risks as part of the decisionmaking process. States and Companies, written especially for students of international business and executives of transnational companies, presents a conceptual framework for the analysis of political risk. Although the author focuses his study on the international oil industry, his explanatory model of political risk is applicable to most transnational companies. Lax's study is important because it focuses on developing a context for understanding political risk rather than simply offering a predictive methodology. He provides the theoretical groundwork for this understanding by explaining political risk in terms of a broader theory of interaction between host states and transnational corporations. The inherent conflict of interests and issues hierarchies between these two actors, Lax argues, is the root cause of political risk.

This book addresses energy research from four distinct International Political Economy perspectives: energy security, governance, legal and developmental areas. Energy is too important to be neglected by political scientists. Yet, within the mainstream of the discipline energy research still remains a peripheral area of academic enquiry seeking to plug into the discipline’s theoretical debates. The purpose of this book is to assess how existing perspectives fit with our understanding of social science energy research by focusing on the oil and gas dimension.

Twelve chapters cover a wide variety of topics, including finance, contracts, political risk insurance, legal issues, economics, and technical cooperation. All treatment of these subjects focuses on conditions expected to exist in the mid 1990s. No subject index or bibliography. Annotation copyright