The discourse on stability of petroleum contracts revolves around how to resolve the tension between the sovereign right to regulate the petroleum industry and the necessity to protect the legitimate interests of foreign investors. The irreversible nature of investment in the petroleum sector, the long pay back period in petroleum contracts, and the political and commercial risks inherent in petroleum projects necessitates stability over the life of the contract as an essential condition for achieving economic interests for the main players in the petroleum industry. The stability of a petroleum contract involves a complex interaction of the legal, economic and political environment in the host country in which it operates and is profoundly shaped by the interplay between internal and external factors governing the petroleum industry. The aim of the thesis is to examine and analyse the recent trends on stability of the petroleum contract in developing countries and economies in transition. Perception of petroleum as a finite, non-renewable resource and the attendant public interest dimension embedded in the contractual arrangements for its exploitation makes the petroleum industry a highly regulated and historically popular area of state intervention. Petroleum contracts are also vulnerable to various kinds of change of circumstances, which can disturb the economic equilibrium of contracts. Stability mechanisms in legal, contractual and economic forms are needed to counter these political, fiscal and commercial risks in petroleum contracts.The study observes that over the last two decades, the fierce competition among the developing countries and economies in transition for attracting foreign investment in natural resources exploration and the end of their radical nationalistic feelings and hostile attitude towards foreign investment have persuaded them to provide favourable conditions in petroleum contracts for the petroleum companies. The study finds that the petroleum contracts in these countries during this period have been marked by increased stability guarantees, greater flexibility in fiscal terms and increased efforts of the parties to make provisions for renegotiation and adaptation of the contract in changing circumstances to maintain stability in the contract and to attract foreign investment in petroleum projects. The growing concerns about negative environmental impact and consequently regulatory and liability risks by the host states have appeared as a significant political risk factor to the petroleum companies. Similarly, host communities' hostile actions spurred by negative social impact of petroleum operations and human rights violations at various stages of petroleum development can pose a threat to stability and to the economic viability of petroleum projects. The study emphasises that integration of environmental and social concerns in petroleum development, assessment of environmental and social impacts, consultation with key stakeholders in the project design and implementation, equitable distribution of economic benefits from the project, respect for human rights of the host community in petroleum exploitation are all seen as key issues to be addressed in order to reduce negative impacts from project, and to enhance stability of the projects. A clearly defined role for the government and company in the area of social responsibility is needed to reduce much of the uncertainty about the allocation of responsibilities that they should undertake.

Local Content is an oil sector governance and sustainability policy that aims at check-mating the dominance of the foreign oil companies in host countries, and encouraging the participation of the local oil firms in the petroleum value-chain. It is a burgeoning concept applied in the upstream petroleum contracts in the developing petro states. This study was conducted to examine the local content accounting, accountability and governance of the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) and the five major International Oil Companies (IOCs) operating in Nigeria (Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Total and Agip). The soft and hard accountability of the two principal actors were determined. The work drew on the Chatham House Guidelines for Good Governance in Emerging Oil and Gas Producers (2013) to derive its conceptual and analytical models. The study used the convergent parallel design and a combination of the three accounting paradigms to draw its conclusions. Thematic analysis, descriptive and inferential statistics including the post hoc Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests with Bonferroni Corrected Alpha, and the logistic regression tests were used. The study also applied the mechanistic content analysis methodology on fifty sustainability reports of the selected IOCs in line with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (IPIECA) sustainability reporting guidelines. Disclosure index and paired-samples t-test were used to determine the existence and trends in the IOCs’ local content disclosure practices before and after the enactment of the Nigeria’s local content law. The study found the local content policy to be an accountabilitybased sustainability driver in the Nigerian petroleum sector. Although the NCDMB’s performance was favourable to a large extent, the study found that corruption, fronting, and non-disclosure of the beneficial ownership of some oil firms remained the major challenges of local content in Nigeria. An expectation gap between the Board and the stakeholders on the financial accountability was established. The study found moderate and consistent local content disclosure indices of the periods before and after the Nigeria’s local content law, but higher volumetric disclosure in the period after the law, signifying likely impact of the local content law on the IOC’s voluntary disclosure. It was recommended that the Board should tighten up its regulatory responsibilities and avoid questionable practices. It was also suggested that the Nigerian local content rules should incorporate more incentives such as unringfencing and crossfencing of upstream costs to encourage more investment. The study also suggested that the accounting standard-setting bodies should issue dedicated accounting standards or expand the existing IFRS 8 and IAS 21 to comprehensively address the preparation and presentation of local content information in the annual financial statements.

There is a vast literature on the distortionary effects of the tax-royalty system, while the effects of Production Sharing Contract (PSC) is largely understudied. Moreover, economic studies typically oversimplify the physics of the field and consequently end up with models which do not necessarily fully reflect the reality. In this study, we build a dynamic optimisation model which nests the physics of the reservoir and investigates the distortionary effects of a PSC.

Submitted by Raphael Galvão (ragalvao@fgvmail.br) on 2012-07-09T20:42:40Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Final.pdf: 656325 bytes, checksum: f1473665cd7f28ca27dda44778c5013c (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Janete de Oliveira Feitosa (janete.feitosa@fgv.br) on 2012-07-25T13:37:23Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Final.pdf: 656325 bytes, checksum: f1473665cd7f28ca27dda44778c5013c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2012-07-30T12:35:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Final.pdf: 656325 bytes, checksum: f1473665cd7f28ca27dda44778c5013c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-07-06 / This work considers a relationship between a regulator and an oil company. There are many uncertainties inherent in this relationship and we focus on the e ects of asymmetric information. We characterize the optimal regulation under asymmetric information, when the regulator must design a mechanism that induces truthful revelation about the rm's private information. We show that, when the rm cannot commit not to quit the relationship, the regulator may not be able to implement the optimal rst-best regulatory outcome. In this case, the regulator cannot achieve the optimal risk-sharing with the rm. We also provide an example, in which we show that the Spence-Mirrlees condition (SMC) may not hold. As it turs out, this is a natural result in our model rather than an imposition. / Neste trabalho é analisada a relação entre um regulador e uma empresa petrolífera. Há várias incertezas inerentes à essa relação e o trabalho se concentra nos efeitos da assimetria de informação. Fazemos a caracterização da regulação ótima sob informação assimétrica, quando o regulador deve desenhar um mecanismo que induz a firma a revelar corretamente sua informação privada. No caso em que a rma não pode se comprometer a não romper o acordo, mostramos que o regulador pode não implementar o resultado ótimo que é obtido sob informação completa. Nesse caso, o regulador não consegue compartilhar os riscos com a firma de forma ótima. Por fim, é apresentado um exemplo, em que mostramos que a condição de Spence-Mirrlees (SMC) pode não valer. Esse resultado aparece de forma natural no modelo.

Cette thèse traite de l'évolution du cadre organisationnel et institutionnel de l'industrie pétrolière russe durant la période 1992-2012. Son objectif est de caractériser et d'interpréter l'accroissement du rôle des compagnies pétrolières à capitaux majoritairement publics, Rosneft et Gazpromneft, dans les opérations de l'amont pétrolier qui est observé depuis le milieu des années 2000. Dans ce cadre théorique de la Nouvelle économie institutionnelle, notre thèse soutient que le rôle accru des compagnies pétrolières publiques russes marque le passage d'une structure de gouvernance pétrolière libérale à une structure de gouvernance pétrolière hybride. Cela doit être interprété comme la réponse faisable, de la part des autorités fédérales, à l'incohérence existant entre la structure de gouvernance pétrolière libérale définie au début du processus de transition et l'environnement institutionnel prévalant en Russie. / This PhD dissertation deals with the evolution of the institutional and organizational framework of the Russian oil indThis PhD dissertation deals with the evolution of the institutional and organizational framework of the Russian oil industry during the period 1992-2012. Its main objective is to characterize and reinterpret the increasing involvement of the national oil companies (NOCs), Rosneft and Gazpromneft, in the upstream activities observed since the middle of the 2000's. Relying on the New Institutional Economics framewrokd, we argue that the increasing involvement of the Russian NOCs can be characterized as a change from a liberal oil governance structure to a hybrid oil governance structure. We show that this organizational evolution must be interpreted as the feasible reform that can be implemented by the federal authorities for dealing with the incoherence between the liberal governance structure defined at the beginning of the transition process and the Russian institutional environment.