Recent Articles

Revenue Watch Institute and a team of economists and legal and environmental experts are collaborating on the creation of an international Natural Resource Charter. The pioneering document offers policy makers in resource-rich countries a vision and a blueprint for the future of their country's natural resource sector.
News Article ~ 3 March 2009
On February 4, 2009, the tenge, Kazakhstan's national currency, lost more than 20 percent of its value against the US dollar, sending shockwaves throughout the economy. Since the summer of 2007, the country's central bank has been doggedly defending the national currency at a rate of 120 tenge per US dollar, with 2 percent fluctuations. Other countries have followed suit, the Jamestown Foundation has reported, with the som, the currency of the Kyrgyz Republic, losing approximately 10 percent of its value in early February, and the Tajik somoni also falling by around 10 percent in the past month. The financial woes of Kazakhstan and its Central Asian neighbors have created what some fear are ripe opportunities for Russian resurgence in the region.
News Article ~ 26 February 2009
As a new oil-producing "hot spot," Ghana must move forward cautiously and make serious efforts towards transparency, accountability and development, warns a new report from RWI partners Oxfam America and the Integrated Social Development Centre (ISODEC) in Ghana. Ghana is poised for an oil boom that could flood the country with billions of dollars in new revenue after the discovery of its first major offshore field.
News Article ~ 19 February 2009
On February 18, Global Integrity launched its 2008 Integrity report, a review of anti-corruption practices in 57 countries. The report compiles the work of hundreds of journalists and researchers from around the world on local anti-corruption safeguards, and includes the group's first-ever reports on Iraq and Somalia.
News Article ~ 18 February 2009
Carlos Monge, RWI Latin America Regional Coordinator, and colleagues deliver fresh news and insight. Issue February 3 covers Bolivia's new Constitution and its impact on the extractive sector; Latin American extractive companies efforts to find financing; and adjustments in oil price stabilization mechanisms for 2009.
News Article ~ 3 February 2009
Are natural resource abundance and opaque budgets inextricably linked? The Open Budget Survey 2008—a comprehensive evaluation of budget transparency in 85 countries—finds that resource-dependent countries tend to be less transparent than countries that are not resource dependent.
News Article ~ 2 February 2009

Today the International Budget Partnership released its Open Budget Index for 2008. The index is a biennial, independent, comparative measure of government budget transparency in 85 countries. This year for the first time, the report includes data on openness and public accountability in China, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

News Article ~ 2 February 2009
Carlos Monge, RWI Latin America Regional Coordinator, and colleagues deliver fresh news and insight. Issue January 19 covers Bolivian efforts to diversify markets for its natural gas; Ecuador's announced plans to put the ITT oil field up for bidding; and the wave of layoffs in the extractive sector intensifies across Latin America.
News Article ~ 19 January 2009
On January 7, 2009, Ghana successfully conducted a peaceful political transition from ex-President John Agyekum Kuffour of the New Patriotic Party, who had been in power since 2000, to President JEA Mills of the National Democratic Congress.
News Article ~ 13 January 2009
The Mexican Congress has recently approved seven different bills to reform some aspects of its energy sector, including the national oil company's legal regime. The new legislation is based on the idea that it is possible to modernize the state monopoly (Pemex), and reverse a declining trend in production and reserves, without liberalizing the hydrocarbon sector. The objective of this reform is to provide Pemex greater flexibility when pursuing contracts with private companies (for services, leases and procurement of materials), without losing control of strategic decisions or relinquishing ownership over reserves and production.
News Article ~ 9 January 2009
In today's Houston Chronicle, Revenue Watch legal fellow Susan Maples responds to a recent article about the proposed new company disclosure rules in the Extractive Industries Transparency Disclosure Act now making its way through U.S. Congress.
News Article ~ 17 December 2008
New York Times editor and former East Africa bureau chief Ian Fisher examines the linked histories of conflict, poverty and natrual resource wealth in Africa, including sections on oil and minerals.
News Article ~ 14 December 2008
In three post-Soviet countries, a new awareness of the resource curse is growing. Revenue Watch and the Soros Foundation Kazakhstan gathered more than fifty leaders in Kazakhstan last month for conference on efficiency in public spending. Like other oil-rich countries, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia have struggled with the paradox of abundant resource wealth combined with a plague of social ills, but they are now exploring ways to take the transparency movement a step further, and apply the same standard of openness that guides revenue oversight to the question of public spending.
News Article ~ 12 December 2008
The global financial crisis has undoubtedly taken a toll on sovereign wealth funds. Governments facing a credit shortage are under increased pressure to draw on accumulated assets, in order to shore up equity markets or to sustain domestic financial markets. In his Follow the Money blog from the Council on Foreign Relations, economist Brad Setser predicts that SWFs will fall "well short" of previous growth estimates.
News Article ~ 26 November 2008
Carlos Monge, RWI Latin America Regional Coordinator, and colleagues deliver fresh news and insight. Issue November 24 covers proposed legal changes for Ecuador's mining sector; energy shortages due to smuggling, high demand and policies that favor natural gas exports; and volatility in international mineral and oil prices.
News Article ~ 24 November 2008
As Uganda prepares to become an oil-producing country, one expert is asking if the nation's new-found reserves will yield national growth or economic doom. In an article in Uganda's "New Vision," researcher Frank Tumusiime, of the Africa Institute for Energy Governance, questions whether the country is positioned to translate oil revenues into capital investments for development.
News Article ~ 17 November 2008
Revenue Watch Institute and Soros Foundation-Kazakhstan will hold an international conference, entitled "Efficiency of Public Spending in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia" on November 14-15, 2008. The conference will take place in Astana, Kazakhstan at the Okan Intercontinental Hotel (the Istanbul Hall).
News Article ~ 14 November 2008
From CNN, read an essay on America's oil addiction by professor Michael Watts, coauthor with photojournalist Ed Kashi of Black Gold, excerpted from the new book "What Matters," a collection of 18 photo-essays and polemical articles on the pressing issues of our age, created by New York Times bestselling author David Elliot Cohen.
News Article ~ 10 November 2008
Carlos Monge, RWI Latin America Regional Coordinator, and colleagues deliver fresh news and insight. Issue November 8 covers continued high fuel prices for consumers despite the fall in international prices; persistent conflicts due to a lack of State attention; and strenghtened bonds between Ecuador and Venezuela.
News Article ~ 8 November 2008
During the last International Monetary Fund-World Bank fall meetings, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, warned that Nigeria’s savings from the oil windfall have been depleted and may not be able to play a counter-cyclical role if the financial crisis further depresses oil price below the Federal budget benchmark. The combination of the downturn in oil prices and the depletion of the excess crude account illustrate the need for strengthened resource revenue and public expenditure management at the federal, state and local level in Nigeria.
News Article ~ 3 November 2008
Carlos Monge, RWI Latin America Regional Coordinator, and colleagues deliver fresh news and insight. Issue October 24 covers the effects of the international drop in major commodity prices in Latin America; the constitutionality of legislative decrees that facilitate opening indigenous and peasant communal lands to large private investment; and regional reforms in energy policy.
News Article ~ 24 October 2008
Each night for a month, messages appeared on the cell phone of a community activist in one of Indonesia’s sprawling urban areas. The messages were consistent, the threat unsubtle: “If you want to live in this city, don’t talk about budgets.” Next came “informal conversations” with the local police, then interrogations. It is dangerous work to empower people, to provide them with information about malfeasance and the tools they need to collect official documents, to show students and housewives how to discover whether government officials, some local, some national, are mismanaging and sometimes skimming massive amounts of revenue paid by foreign companies to extract oil, minerals, and other natural resources.
News Article ~ 10 October 2008
At a September meeting of Publish What You Pay Guinea, senior economist Antoine Heuty presented a workshop on contract transparency. Heuty spoke with Guinea's La Nouvelle Tribune during his visit.
News Article ~ 9 October 2008
Carlos Monge, RWI Latin America Regional Coordinator, and colleagues deliver fresh news and insight. Issue October 8 covers a corruption scandal in Peru's oil block concession; alliances and conflicts in the relationship between state-owned companies in the hydrocarbon sector; and new oil mega projects.
News Article ~ 8 October 2008
Through stunning photographs and firsthand commentary, this RWI slideshow reveals the stark problems of poverty, corruption and environmental abuse that continue to devastate the oil-rich Niger Delta. Narrated by Nigerian transparency advocate Asume Isaac Osuoka and award-winning photojournalist Ed Kashi.
News Article ~ 2 October 2008