The interactions between state budget and political budget in Syria

Zaki Mehchy

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This memo aims to understand how the Syrian regime has used the state budget as a tool to reallocate resources for the benefit of warlords and crony capitalists. This mechanism plays multiple roles in Syria’s contemporary political economy: on one hand, it is one of the means by which elites are given access to political funds in exchange for their loyalty (and other political services). At the same time, it represents one of the different ways in which the regime can replenish its political budget, which refers to the funds available for the ruler for discretionary spending on its elites to ensure their loyalty (de Waal, 2016). The memo analyzes the interactions between state budget and political budget from the perspective of an authoritarian bargain during the conflict in Syria. This approach assumes that repression is not sufficient for authoritarian regimes, including the Syrian one, to sustain control over their countries (Desai et al., 2009). Thus, in parallel to using coercive measures, they need to bargain with people and elites. Finally, the memo also investigates the modalities through which the elites have increasingly benefitted from public spending.

JEL-codes: E6 N0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 8 pages
Date: 2021-02-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-isf
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/108592/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:108592

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().