One of the popular stories told (and taught) in development circles is how corruption was slashed in Uganda simply by publishing the amount of monthly grants to schools. This paper takes a deeper look at the facts behind the Uganda story and finds that while information did indeed play a critical role, the story is much more complicated than we have been led to believe. A dramatic drop did occur in the percentage of funds being diverted from Uganda's capitation grant. But to attribute this leakage solely to the monthly release of grant data by the government risks ignoring the major funding in which this transparency campaign was imbedded.The Center for Global Development is an independent think tank that works to reduce global poverty and inequality through rigorous research and active engagement with the policy community. Use and dissemination of this Working Paper is encouraged, however reproduced copies may not be used for commercial purposes. Further usage is permitted under the terms of the Creative Commons License. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and should not be attributed to the directors or funders of the Center for Global Development.
This paper contributes to the systematic understanding of Chinese investment abroad, and particularly the role of state-owned enterprise (SOE) investors, in two ways. Firstly, we identify major problems in the literature stemming from wide-spread data deficiencies in data. Specifically, the reliability of previous research results has been limited by data sets that do not identify the final destination for Chinese investment, nor suitably differentiate between different ownership types. By augmenting the project-level data from the China Global Investment Tracker with detailed ownership information for each firm, this study reveals that large-scale investment in natural resource investment, which surged after 2008, is dominated by state-owned enterprises controlled by China's central government. But it also reveals a newer wave of non-resource investment after 2009 in which non-state enterprise plays the leading role.Further, we investigate the destination selection of large-scale Chinese investment to 192 countries from 2005 to 2015 -to test the extent to which SOEs might be attracted to poorer institutional host environments. We find that Chinese SOE investment in resources, regardless of ownership type is attracted to countries with political stability, but is negatively related to the rule of law measure. For non-resource investment, we find no strong institutional preferences. We therefore suggest that previous findings of different investment motivations between state-and non-state investors likely reflects the dominance of state-ownership in resource sectors, rather than different investment behaviour based on ownership.
The Bonga field, which is located in deep water off the Nigerian coast, started oil production at the end of 2005. In order to sustain production, seawater injection started from the beginning of the oil production at a rate of 300k bwpd. During the field development it was concluded that seawater injection in Bonga would result in reservoir souring, and that mitigation was necessary. Initially the selected strategy for Bonga seawater injection was to control reservoir souring with biocide and handle low levels of H2S with sour service materials and scavenging facilities topside. The maximum H2S the existing facilities could handle was set at 50 ppm (v). The decision to control reservoir souring with biocide and handle H2S at surface was re-evaluated in 2003, and it was concluded that there would be a risk that the maximum allowable H2S content in the facilities (i.e. 50 ppm(v)) might be exceeded during the life time of the project. Given the positive experience with the injection of nitrate in other seawater floods throughout the industry, nitrate was selected as the mitigation method and injection started directly at the beginning of the waterflood at the end of 2005. As such Bonga is one of the first waterfloods where nitrate is being used to prevent reservoir souring, the main application so far has been to reduce H2S in already sour fields. This paper presents the experience gained with the nitrate injection during the first period of the Bonga waterflood. Issues like logistics and how to ensure nitrate is applied correctly are discussed in more detail. In addition laboratory testing executed to define an appropriate nitrate injection rate under Bonga conditions are also presented. After several months of operation the Minox unit to remove the bulk of the oxygen broke down and oxygen control was done with chemical oxygen scavenger only. With this different mode of operation, the effectiveness of the nitrate as souring mitigation method was expected to be affected. Additional laboratory experiments, also reported in this paper, were performed and did not indicate any issue with respect to the predicted souring. Introduction The Bonga field lies on the continental slope in the southern part of the Niger Delta some 120 km offshore, South West of Warri in Nigeria with water depths ranging from 950 to 1200 m. The main 702 reservoir, which is expected to deliver over half of the recoverable reserves, is comprised of amalgamated turbidite channels. Typical net reservoir thickness is less than 100 ft with sand porosities range from 20 - 37% and multi-Darcy permeabilities. Seawater injection for pressure maintenance and sweep is key to the success of the Bonga development. A total of sixteen wells (nine producers and seven water injectors) were drilled during the Bonga phase 1 drilling campaign. Another twenty-four wells will be drilled in Bonga Main with eight additional "in field opportunity" wells, which started November 2006.All fluids produced are processed on an FPSO situated centrally in the field and oil is directly loaded to tankers. The associated gas is exported through pipelines. Produced water is processed to appropriate standards and disposed of overboard. During the field development it was concluded that Bonga was expected to suffer from reservoir souring and that mitigation would be necessary. Initially the expected H2S content resulting from reservoir souring was not expected to exceed 50 ppm (v) in the gas phase, but when more data became available it was realised that the reservoir souring may be more severe and the final mitigation method included the use of nitrate (Ref. 1). The nitrate injection rate was 45 ppm w/v active nitrate, which was based on field experience only as currently there is no engineering method available to optimise this injection rate.
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