CHAPTER IV
A Typology of Political-Economic Trajectories Under Commodity Boom Conditions
Previous chapters have made the case that, during the commodity boom, natural resource exports presented an escape route from previous neoliberalizing constraints. I argue that both these neoliberal parameters and the China-driven changes in commodity markets that allowed for their transcendence operate primarily as global systemic conditions, forming and transforming through complex (and unequal) part–part and part–whole relations within a world-system not reducible to interactions among national societies. Nevertheless, it is at the national level that pressure toward neoliberalization and the exit hatch opened by the commodity boom have been manifested, as consequences flowing from shifting circumstances of national insertion into the global market.
Of course, there is no direct or mechanical correspondence between global dynamics and local political economy formation (Cardoso and Faletto 1979, xv). This notion, in fact, is the basis for the framing of my first hypothesis in terms of resource exports as a necessary cause—the opportunity for local actors to pursue a non-neoliberal path was opened by global processes, but there was no globally generated imperative for any particular resource-rich state to do so. Building on this analysis, then, two obvious questions present themselves: Under what circumstances might a break with a neoliberalizing course occur in a given Southern resource-exporting state, given commodity boom conditions? And what form(s) might such breaks take?1 Since it is not possible to read answers to either question from analysis of global shifts, a change in scale to consider intranational forces is required.
A theoretical problem presents itself at this stage, however. The notion of systemic change at the global level derives from the premise of a single world capitalism, which should, by most accounts, be fundamentally incompatible with an analysis of discrete national societies.2 My intention is to manage the jump in scale from global to national by arguing that global structures essentially manifest themselves in the local sphere as a kind of topography over which intranational relations play out.3 Each Southern state faces unequal circumstances of insertion into the global economy, which unevenly constrain or empower certain domestic social forces (including transnational capital operating within the domestic sphere) and limit the spectrum of viable policy choices. When global economic structural change acts to alter these circumstances of insertion—trade relationships, investment patterns, or the workings of global markets, for instance—the economic basis for action waxes and wanes differentially across the various groups of local actors.
Such global shifts do not arrive in a national vacuum but are superimposed upon existing patterns of uneven social relations. Thus, while it is possible to see commonalities in the effects of the 1970s oil boom on, say, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Indonesia, their very different internal social dynamics prior to the boom made for distinct directions of travel when the impact of rising prices began to be felt (Freund 1978; Coronil 1997, chap. 6; Robison 1988). Shifts in the global market might therefore be thought of as forming and reforming the landscape on which local groups relate to one another, though with their composition, relative strength, and orientation being the result of many previous rounds of interaction among themselves, played out as partly contingent processes, on terrain corresponding to past iterations of global structural conditions.
At times, global reconfigurations may be sufficiently broad as to have a major impact in almost all countries, as with the turn away from Fordism–developmentalism and toward neoliberalism, discussed in chapter 2. In other instances, the domestic effects of world structural change may be largely concentrated among particular kinds of states, as with the China-led commodity boom beginning in 2002. By enhancing the potential for natural resource–exporting states to capture a greater proportion of rising commodity rents, the possibility of using these flows to transcend externally derived neoliberal constraints was opened, clearing the way for domestic actors to reassert their autonomy in defining the state’s political-economic orientation.
Processes of neoliberalization, as well as prior historical periods, clearly left an indelible mark in terms of shaping the starting points, alliances, and orientations of various local groups at the beginning of the commodity boom years. It is also obvious that the boom did not act to remove all constraints presented by global economic conditions—many of the states surveyed were still to a greater or lesser extent dependent upon foreign capital and could not entirely ignore its preferences. Nevertheless, as will become evident through a consideration of the cases, commodity boom conditions among Southern resource exporters were more akin to the relative national autonomy, within broad limits, of the Fordist–developmentalist period than to the far more circumscribed policy choices associated with the neoliberal era.
Forming the Typology
The typology presented in chapters 5 through 9, and summarized here, revolves around the central argument that, in the context of greater national policy autonomy experienced during the commodity boom years, local social and state–society relations were the main shaper and driver of the form of political-economic orientation adopted in a given state, whether or not this involved a break with neoliberal orthodoxy.4 Where breaks occurred, this was, in the main, a result of pressure from domestic actors who succeeded in deploying commodity revenues toward the implementation of policy programs that favored their particular interests. Three broad types of distinct post-neoliberal turn are observed, associated with a leading role, respectively, for industrial capitalists (neodevelopmentalist type), popular class coalitions (extractivist-redistributive), or clientelistic state bureaucracies (extractivist-oligarchic). The remaining two types represent commodity boom trajectories where neoliberalization persisted, even if the impact of the commodity boom meant that state–society relations could not be described as static or unchanged from the previous period. In one of these two types (the homegrown orthodoxy type), continued neoliberalization was driven by externally oriented local capitalist fractions with extensive transnational links. In the other (donor-dependent orthodoxy), it was driven by state managers upholding a status quo that preserved their positions at the head of a nexus of patronage relations interconnected to international donors.
The summary of the typology shown in tables 4.1 and 4.2 provides details of the relative strength of domestic actors for each category, brief comments on the political-economic structure and overall policy orientation associated with the different types, and a list of cases considered as broadly corresponding with the ideotypical characteristics identified with a given type.5 Each type relates to a policy orientation underpinned by a pattern of social relations that emerged during the commodity boom years (approximately 2002 to 2013), though where breaks with neoliberalization occurred, they did not necessarily do so at the beginning of the period (since boom conditions enabled rather than compelled the occurrence of such shifts). The end of the commodity boom brought back conditions that were hostile to post-neoliberal experiments, which is why the typology here is limited to the period from 2002 to 2013, as the earliest and latest points at which a commodity-fueled break would have been possible. After the boom, the various cases of post-neoliberal break have met disparate fates, some hanging on with variable degrees of success or failure, while most have turned back in broadly neoliberal directions, as is discussed in the following chapters.
The task of forming the typology of resource-exporting states does not lend itself to the reduction of each case’s characteristics to dichotomous values indicating the presence or absence of each feature, as in the qualitative comparative analysis used in the chapter 3. This is because, with the exception of aid dependence, all of the variables along which a type is defined (capitalist strength, popular class strength, political-economic structure, and political-economic model) are multifaceted and difficult to distill into singular values. I therefore assign cases to types based on a qualitative assessment of similarity between ideotypical form and the characteristics of a particular case across all five variables. The notion of family resemblance is a guiding principle in the sense that, while a match between a given case and the ideal type for any one variable is not necessary for type membership, a close correspondence across the majority of variables is required.
In each of the typology chapters, I provide a table that summarizes the features of the ideal type and the cases belonging to this type across the five variables. As an example, table 4.3 shows this summary for the extractivist-oligarchic type, to which chapter 7 is devoted. As can be seen, Angola is a close, though in some instances not exact, match with the ideal type across all variables. Kazakhstan, however, presents greater variation from the ideal type, particularly on the “capitalists” variable.
Typology of commodity boom political-economic trajectories among Southern resource-exporting states
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Oligarchic-Extractivist |
Redistributive-Extractivist |
Neodevelopmentalist |
Donor-Dependent Orthodoxy |
Homegrown Orthodoxy |
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Angola (oil) |
Ecuador (oil) |
Brazil (iron ore, soy, oil) |
Mongolia (copper, coal) |
Peru (copper, zinc) |
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Kazakhstan (oil, copper) |
Venezuela (oil) |
Argentina (soy, oil) |
Zambia (copper, cobalt) |
South Africa (platinum, coal) |
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Bolivia (natural gas, tin) |
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Laos (copper, coal) |
Colombia (oil, coal) |
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Indonesia (natural gas, coal, oil, copper) |
Note: Main exports of listed countries are in parentheses.
Political-economic structure of ideal types under commodity boom conditions, 2002–2013
Oligarchic-extractivist ideal type and cases
|
Ideal Type |
Angola |
Kazakhstan |
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Capitalists |
Weak. Highly dependent upon and fused with state |
Few “true” capitalists—public funding funneled into developmental schemes that provide flows of rent to elites, little of which (though perhaps some) appears to have laid ground for accumulation. Main domestic capitalist actor is state-owned oil enterprise Sonangol. |
Two-tiered oligarchy, with first stratum composed of inner circle close to president, allocated control of natural resource industries. Emergent second tier bearing closer resemblance to capitalist class but increasingly co-opted by state. |
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Popular classes |
Weak |
Weak. Nascent urban middle class, but nurtured by and dependent upon state patronage. |
Weak. Occasional agitation from unionized energy workers, but no broader movement. Crackdown following shootings of oil workers in 2011. |
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Legacy of aid dependence |
No |
No |
No |
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Political-economic structure |
Access to state resources confers economic power (through access to resource rents). Capitalist class therefore overlaps to large extent with governing party and bureaucracy. Patronage-based politics. Little disciplinary power exercised by international financial institutions—little pressure to appear democratic or to follow neoliberal policies. |
Dominant authoritarian presidency with wide range of de facto discretionary powers. Oil revenue allocated via Sonangol as patronage to narrow elite. Lines between state and private realms blurred. Deal signed with International Monetary Fund in 2009 but no policy conditionality other than limited demands for greater transparency. |
Paternalistic authoritarian president tops “power vertical” system. Large overlap between apex of state and private elite. Business ownership depends upon patronage, particularly in most profitable sectors. |
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Model |
Disjuncture between avowed developmentalist model and reality, which tends more towards distribution of rents to elites. State/quasi-state or private domestically owned (or joint venture) resources fund capital-intensive development concentrated on urban centers, highly noninclusive development initiatives which tend toward predation. Infrastructure, prestige projects, takes Gulf States/Singapore/China as purported models. |
Official development strategy evokes high modernist vision of development. Huge road- and rail-building program. Ambitious projects in industrialization, agriculture, and housing serve as vehicles for predation, though some nascent accumulation may be occurring. Elite enrichment justified as creation of national bourgeoisie. Much of country virtually untouched by new development efforts. |
Developmental success major part of regime legitimacy. Use of “snow leopard” motif invites comparisons with Asian tigers. Shift from post-Soviet neoliberalism toward state capitalism, particularly since 2008, under auspices of state holding company Samruk-Kazyna. Large-scale development plan including petrochemicals, infrastructure, and housing. Samruk-Kazyna also used to distribute patronage to elites. |
As is explained more fully in chapter 7, the ideotypical feature here is a weakness of domestic private capital to the point that the local political economy is instead dominated by the distribution of patronage resources, which flow from the state. This results in a ruling political elite that straddles the formal public–private divide (and may, for instance, include business owners) but that does not constitute a true capitalist class, since their position tends to be based more upon access to and distribution of rents than the accumulation of capital. The Kazakhstani case does not exactly follow this pattern, in the sense that a group of capitalists somewhat independent of the state has begun to emerge. Even on this variable, though, the situation observed in Kazakhstan, of a quasi-capitalist upper elite dependent upon ties to the presidency, with the addition of a somewhat more independent second capitalist tier, still follows the ideotypical model in most respects. Nevertheless, even if Kazakhstan were judged as not matching the ideal characteristic on this variable, the case does correspond more closely along the other variables, as can be seen in table 4.3.
Conceptualizing Social Forces
Prior to presenting the typology over the following chapters, some attention must be devoted to explaining the class and class fraction categories used in its formation. Despite a long and respected tradition (Cardoso and Faletto 1979; Paige 1978; Evans 1979; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992) and occasional newer examples (Achcar 2013; Allinson 2015), class analysis of peripheral social formations has declined in prominence over recent years, at least among English-language authors. Where class analysis has been conducted in relation to the global South, the perhaps most widely read works of recent years have concentrated on the purported formation of a transnational capitalist class (TCC) as the most significant contemporary process (Robinson 2001, 2004; Sklair 2001).
The claim, particularly associated with William Robinson, that a united transnational capitalist class not only exists but is in the process of forming a transnational state via the International Monetary Fund, the WTO, and the like, is justly criticized in many quarters as rather overblown (Block 2001; McMichael 2001). Nevertheless, as a relatively contemporary theoretical current that concerns shifts in national–transnational class dynamics, TCC writings are a natural first port of call for the following analysis, even if their main proposition runs counter to my argument for a renewed foregrounding of the domestic during the commodity boom years (at least in resource-exporting states). By critically combining insights from TCC theorists with earlier views on peripheral classes and the state, I seek to construct a model capable of accounting for the forms of inter- and intraclass struggles seen across my range of cases. For resource-exporting states in the South, these struggles primarily revolve around control of the extractive surplus, whether this is direct (in the form of profits) or indirect (through state redistribution via taxation).
I argue for the saliency of three major dimensions to this struggle, which, taken together, play a primary role in determining the leading social actors in a particular state and thus the political-economic direction pursued under commodity boom conditions. First, the degree to which leading capitalist sectors are oriented toward and integrated with transnational capital is significant, as TCC scholars argue, though this orientation cannot be reduced to a simple dichotomy between nationally and transnationally oriented elements, as is the tendency in TCC literature. Second, domestic historical, geographic, and contingent factors all have a role to play in the relative strength and unity of the various classes, class fractions, and other social actors, meaning that the preferences and strategies of any one group cannot simply be determined via reference to their objective interests. Third, as discussed previously, world-historical conditions present domestic actors with an uneven topography with which all must contend, unevenly narrowing or widening the parameters of possible action for each group.
TCC scholars see the turn toward the globalization of circuits of production and exchange from the 1970s as part of an incipient process of transnational capitalist class formation (Sklair 2001; Robinson 2001; Robinson and Harris 2000), through which leading capitalist firms free themselves from ties to particular nation-states. While space does not permit a thorough interrogation of these claims, a useful departure point for current purposes is the TCC notion of national versus transnational orientation as the primary axis of intracapitalist conflict in the neoliberal era (Robinson 2008, 170). Here “descendent” capitalist fractions whose interests correspond with the development of nationally bounded capitalisms (such as import-substituting industry) fight a losing battle with an “ascendant” bourgeoisie whose objectives lie in the extension of a global capitalism unfettered by national borders.
Problematically, however, these accounts tend to both underestimate geographic unevenness and run the risk of assuming an automatic correspondence between basis of accumulation and intracapitalist alliance formation. Kaup’s (2013c) mapping of neoliberal and counter-neoliberal turns in Bolivia is helpful on both points. First, as he points out, there is a need to consider distinct “spatialities of power” among capitalist fractions, drawing a distinction between “global elites that participate in local circuits of accumulation and local elites that participate in global circuits of accumulation” (102, emphasis in original). The global elites can use their spatially diffuse power base to avoid (via shifting location) or minimize (via appeal to global institutions such as the WTO) the risks posed by local class conflict. Local elites may not be reliant upon local markets and might perhaps benefit from similar protection by global institutions. They do, though, tend to be more intimately interwoven with and dependent upon local class relations as well as a domestic productive base. As Kaup notes, a failure on the part of local, transnationally oriented capitalists to deal with domestic opposition, whether from rival fractions or popular classes, may result in a catastrophic loss of power and influence.
A second problem for TCC theories, in the context of Southern social formations, is a too-neat division of local capital into national and transnational wings, which fails to adequately account for the dimensions of intraclass relations during the neoliberal era or to help illuminate their shifts during the commodity boom years. In many respects, as Kaup notes, the TCC schema maps onto older delineations of peripheral capitalist classes (see, particularly, Poulantzas 1975). Most obviously, a national bourgeoisie is identified by both theoretical traditions. With a domestic base of accumulation, this fraction is expected to push for a domestically oriented economic strategy broadly in line with the postwar developmentalist settlement.6
Set against this group, the domestic representatives of the transnational capitalist class, as described in the TCC literature, are essentially equivalent to a combination of two of Poulantzas’s postulated groups: the comprador bourgeoisie—which has no domestic basis of accumulation and therefore acts primarily as agent for foreign capital—and the internal bourgeoisie—which possesses some domestic base but still relies upon global circuits of capital. Following either of the TCC or the national–internal–comprador models, then, potentially fits with a picture of an intraclass conflict (national versus TCC, or national versus comprador and internal), manifested in each case as a struggle for state policies favorable to each fraction’s interests (that is, developmentalism versus neoliberalism).7
Chibber (2003, 2005) makes the point, however, that while intraclass differentiation on the basis of distinct linkages to core capital is not ruled out, many peripheral capitalists “seem to have been happy to play both roles simultaneously—trying to protect their domestic market, while striving for lasting ties with metropolitan firms” (Chibber 2005, 2). In this way, most peripheral capital might be best characterized as part of an internal bourgeoisie, or at least as occupying some intermediate location along a national–comprador continuum. If such is accepted, then the shift from developmentalist to neoliberal national settlements across the South, which began in the 1970s, cannot realistically be framed, as TCC scholarship would have it, as solely or primarily a conflict of domestically versus transnationally oriented capitalist fractions.
This has major implications for typology formation, given my characterization of the commodity boom as, for resource exporters, a diminution of transnational disciplinary power and a renewed foregrounding of domestic power struggles as determinative. Applying TCC arguments to these shifts would tend to suggest that commodity boom–driven breaks with neoliberalism represent a simple reversal in the tide of transnational versus domestic struggle, to now once again favor the national bourgeoisie. If, however, most groupings of capital do not easily fit into such a dichotomy, how might they be distinguished from one another, and how does this translate into the favoring of particular development strategies?
Returning to Kaup, it seems clear that other potential axes of struggle are possible, in addition to that of the domestic–transnational. In Bolivia, which lacks a strong urban industrial sector as in some of its larger neighbors, the group that benefited most from developmentalist-like policies of subsidies, infrastructure investment, and easy credit were lowland agriculturalists—hardly a national bourgeoisie. In the 1980s, economic crisis and structural adjustment provided an avenue for a rival highland mining elite to gain political ascendancy by hitching themselves to an IFI-supported neoliberalization process, which brought partnerships with foreign extractive capital but also crucially removed state support from their lowland counterparts.
While objective interest clearly has some bearing on this kind of sequence, a legacy of partly contingent historical struggle seems to play the decisive role. Kaup’s argument here is that in an extractive economy like Bolivia’s, the intracapitalist struggle that occurs is really about access to the material benefits that flow from the resource sector, whether directly, in the form of profits, or indirectly, via state revenues recycled into subsidies, loans, government procurement, and other forms of spending.
However, Kaup seems to see this share of the extractive surplus as a kind of fixed prize, up for grabs to the (current) winner of the domestic class struggle. The problem is that this argument leaves out important world-historical dimensions to intracapitalist struggle in resource-exporting states—structural shifts both in commodity markets and in the global political-economic terrain more generally—which place constraints on the distribution of extractive revenues. In every case examined as part of the typology, the conditions of the neoliberal era largely ruled out the launching of any new effort to funnel extractive revenues, via the state, to a particular branch of the domestic bourgeoisie. First, low commodity prices significantly reduced both the absolute size of the surplus and the power of the state to bargain for a larger relative share. Second, increasing levels of debt meant less capacity for public spending and a growing reliance upon IFIs insistent upon adherence to structural adjustment programs and their successors. Third, IFI conditionalities generally stipulated that the state would work to reduce its claims on extractive revenue through privatization and lowering of taxes in the sector. Fourth, even had state coffers borne developmentalist or redistributive spending, agreements with IFIs—together with new sets of global rules—mostly ruled out preferential treatment for domestic firms and pressured governments to cut back on social spending.
Seen in these terms, those fractions of domestic capital that benefited from the shift toward neoliberalization did so in one of two ways. The most obvious benefit was the lowering of the tax burden and the opening up of the sector to domestic bourgeoisies with direct interests in the extractive industries. In other cases, the situation was more of a negative-sum game. Where little in the way of domestic ownership in resource industries existed (or was created), the main consequence of neoliberalization, in terms of extraction, was a diminution of the proportion of extractive surplus that was retained in the domestic sphere via government revenue. In these instances, capitalist fractions would gain primarily in relative terms, via the ensuing paucity of state resources with which rival groups could be supported through subsidies, easy credit, and the like.8 In Bolivia, both effects are observed. An existing mining bourgeoisie was granted greater access to deposits previously reserved for the state-owned enterprise COMIBOL, but it also was strengthened, in relative terms, by a withdrawal of protective tariffs and subsidies from sectors associated with lowland agrocapital.
The rise of China and the subsequent commodity boom was highly significant for resource-exporting peripheral states, principally because the result was to put the extractive surplus in play once again, negating the four points outlined here and extending the possibility of its control to a larger array of domestic social groups. First, high commodity prices meant a larger absolute surplus and greater state bargaining power over the size of its share. Second, increased commodity revenues lifted or lessened IFI and aid dependence (and their attendant conditionalities) and provided an autonomous fiscal resource for public spending. Third, the lifting of conditionalities allowed states a free hand to bargain with extractive firms, unencumbered by the demands of IFIs. Fourth, with potentially healthy fiscal positions and less constriction by IFI agreements, resource-exporting states were potentially in position to launch programs aimed at national development or redistribution.9 In other words, they may have had a newfound ability to appropriate and employ a significant chunk of the extractive surplus in favor of one or more fractions of the domestic bourgeoisie in a way that was not possible under neoliberal conditions.
If the use of the state as a means of channeling extractive surplus to particular kinds of capitalists was ruled out under neoliberalism and reentered the realm of possibility during the commodity boom, a similar logic applies to popular classes.10 Neoliberal constraints significantly narrowed the scope for social spending, pushed governments to reduce the size of public sector payrolls, and undermined the organizational capacity of workers via labor flexibilization programs. Popular mobilization was still a potentially powerful force in some cases, though, and Latin America, especially, saw several instances of leaders elected through their channeling of anti-neoliberal populism (Weyland 2003; de la Torre 1997). However, most of these presidents quickly reversed their stance upon election (Stokes 2001, 2–5) or faced punishment by IFIs and markets, followed by economic chaos.11 Again, within the context of a high levels of indebtedness, a break with neoliberalism (rather than an attempt to resist or blunt its advance) was simply not possible for Southern states—even if popular class led movements were able to secure electoral victories—while global neoliberal conditions persisted.
If the commodity boom opened the door for post-neoliberal turns, though, what were the implications for a popular class movement that was able to gain state power? In the case of Bolivia, Kaup sees the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement for Socialism, or MAS) as rather timid and, in fact, as working to secure the position of transnational (particularly extractive) capital in Bolivia. A more detailed examination of Evo Morales’s program appears in chapter 6. For now, it is worth noting that the MAS in government certainly has been less radical than some observers had hoped (Webber 2010), and it most definitely entered into partnership with transnational extractive firms, albeit on terms more favorable to the state.
Nevertheless, my argument is that, while Bolivia under Morales remains clearly capitalist, its trajectory over the boom years (and hung on to since) was no longer wedded to neoliberalism. A larger role for the state in extraction, and consequently greater revenues, funded new social spending and, for example, public investment in transport and rural electrification. This pattern was reflected even more strongly in Ecuador and Venezuela, the other resource-exporting states that saw popular mobilization come to the fore during the commodity boom. Governments grounded in such movements still faced clear limits on their policy choices (and, especially in Venezuela, would run into serious contradictions of their own), but they were still relatively unconstrained in comparison with the previous neoliberal period.
The final domestic social force of causal significance in the typology is the state itself, as has already been noted in the brief discussion of Angola and Kazakhstan. Clearly, rulers and state managers have had a role to play in all of the countries surveyed. But in cases where large domestic capital is either absent or lacks the capability to operate autonomously of the state, the power of those political elites with control over the latter is foregrounded. Political clientelism is a feature of all polities, North and South, but becomes more dominant as a logic of governance depending on the extent that the state represents the only significant nexus of accumulation and rents in the domestic economy.12
The next five chapters each focus on one of my types and follow a similar structure in doing so. After a short introduction, I give a description of the given ideal type, principally in terms of political-economic path during the course of the commodity boom. For three of the types (neodevelopmentalist, extractivist-redistributive, and extractivist-oligarchic), the goal is to illustrate, in general terms, each distinct form of divergence from previous neoliberalization, highlighting the linkages between the reconfiguration of domestic class relations and policy change. For the other two chapters/types (donor-dependent orthodoxy and homegrown orthodoxy), the aims are similar but are geared toward an understanding of these two distinct forms of overall neoliberal continuity.
In each chapter, I then examine the impact of the commodity boom on the circumstances of insertion into the world economy, for cases belonging to the type under discussion, looking at trends in the global markets for their resource exports and, in turn, outcomes in terms of changes in government revenue and expenditure. For some cases—as with Angola, for instance—there have been substantial direct linkages with China, both in terms of Chinese investment and loans and bilateral trade. However, while these connections, where present, are noted in my account, it should be remembered that it is not necessary for any resource-exporting state to deal directly with the People’s Republic in any way in order to take advantage of China’s effect on its extractive export sectors. Chinese demand has driven price increases in markets for commodities that are traded globally, which has similar consequences for all resource exporters, whether their main export destination is China or anywhere else.
The next sections in each typology chapter deal with the domestic political economies of those cases that correspond to the given type. Owing to space limitations, I select one case as an exemplar of the type and give a detailed examination of its trajectory during the commodity boom, while also providing necessarily shorter summaries of the other cases. I discuss Jamaica alongside cases of the homegrown orthodoxy type, since its political-economic orientation most closely resembles this ideotypical configuration. As is detailed at length in chapter 9, however, Jamaica does not strictly belong in this type, or indeed in the typology as a whole. The Caribbean nation is the only case, of all those considered, in which the resource export sector (for bauxite/alumina) was not subject to the surge of Chinese demand that drove the potential for post-neoliberal openings in other resource-rich states. Jamaica is therefore a crucial counterfactual case, used to probe the unusual empirical situation of a contemporary resource exporter largely bypassed by the China-led commodity boom.