CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Breban, Dan |
|---|---|
| Title | Impact of the EU Green Deal on the Natural Resource-Dependent Soviet Successor States: Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan in a Post-Oil & Gas Europe? |
| Summary | My thesis attempts to understand why elites in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have struggled to wane their economies of oil and natural gas and transition to a more sustainable economic model for growth. This is particularly important considering both countries’ largest export destination, the EU, aims to become carbon-neutral by the middle of the century. Using a comparative case study analysis on their export composition, state budgets and export destination dependency ratio, over an eleven-year time period, I find that while Kazakhstan is less dependent on oil and natural gas than Azerbaijan, both are still significantly dependent on revenue derived from these resources. Contrasting with my results I argue that the reason for the lack of interest in reforming both economies comes down to elites’ time horizons. In both my case studies, the elites operate within short-time horizons which, in turn, undermine their abilities to implement forward-looking policies. Drawing upon the literature on these post-Soviet countries I find that the reason the elites operate within short-time horizons, rather than long, is due to factors such as Soviet legacy and cultural/regional aspects. |
| Supervisor | Attila Fölsz |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/breban_dan.pdf |
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