PUBLICATION: Reforming National Oil Companies - Nine Recommendations

Some national oil companies (NOCs) have contributed heavily to successful efforts to harness benefits from the oil sector and drive broader national development. In other cases, however, NOCs have become inefficient managers of national resources, obstacles to private investment, drains on public coffers, or sources of patronage and corruption. As such, NOC reform—incremental in some cases, fundamental in others—lies at or near the top of the policy agendas of many oil-rich countries. Building on existing literature, the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) surveyed 12 NOCs operating in Ghana, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Brazil, Saudi Arabi, Angola, Iran, Nigeria, Mexico, Norway, Vietnam, and Cameroon to distill practical steps that policy-makers can take to make their countries' NOCs more effective and more accountable—to governments and to citizens. The NRDI’s recommendations are contained in “Reforming National Oil Companies: Nine Recommendations” published July 2014.

Read the story and access the report by Patrick R. P. Heller, Paasha Mahdavi and Johannes Schreuder in the NRGI website.