The price of wealth: business and state in labor remittance and oil economies

Abstract

This article contrasts the effects of state-controlled oil revenues and privately controlled labor remittances on institutional development, state capacity, and businessgovernment relations in Saudi Arabia and the Yemen Arab Republic. These two countries represent extreme cases of dependence on external capital in deeply divided societies presided over by fragile, emerging bureaucracies. By tracing the two cases through a pattern of economic boom (1973-83) and recession (1983-87), the study demonstrates that the type, volume, and control of capital inflows decisively influence the relative development of the bureaucracy's extractive, distributive, and regulatory capacities and affect the ability of the state to respond to economic crisis. In both cases, external capital inflows precipitated the decline of extractive institutions. However, oil revenues and labor remittances had divergent effects on businessgovernment relations, and this circumscribed the state's ability to implement austerity programs during the recession. During the crisis, the Saudi government's efforts to cut subsidies to the private sector and to implement extractive policies were blocked by the state-sponsored merchant class. In contrast, the Yemeni government instituted a thoroughgoing austerity package that targeted the independent merchant class. In both cases, external capital inflows did not augment the efficacy of those that controlled them. These paradoxical outcomes are explained by tracing the different effects of oil revenues and labor remittances on the distribution of economic opportunity in the public and private sectors and the resulting effects on the regional, tribal, and sectarian composition of the bureaucracy and the commercial class.