Kazakhstan became a petro-state in the 1990s, after signing important oil production agreements with several transnational companies. In recent years, Kazakhstan’s government has imposed the revision of former agreements on these corporations. This article contends that said revision has allowed the national players, government and the state oil company, to extend rent-seeking, but that the changes have not been deep enough to attain national oil empowerment. This means that national players do not control the oil cycle – from upstream to export trade – and are unable to secure continued expansion in the oil sector. Both key issues remain in the hands of the foreign companies, although their prominence has diversified following the entry of large Chinese and Russian companies.
This article analyzes the productivity of the service sector within the countries of the European Union during the period 1994-2005. After disaggregating the sector into 11 branches, the article quantifies the relative contribution of each branch to the growth of service sector aggregate productivity. The main conclusion is that the structure of the industry is increasingly dependent on those branches which have lower growth in labour productivity. This conclusion reveals that the EU service sector suffers from 'Baumol's disease', which helps to accentuate the slow productivity growth that characterizes this sector.* The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.
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