Hot air: hydrocarbons, world money and development in twenty-first century Bolivia

In 2025, Bolivia apparently ran out of money. The huge international reserves<br/>earnt by exporting natural gas during the prior commodities boom (2002–<br/>2013) had been spent – in a large part on hydrocarbon imports. This article<br/>grapples with this contradictory state of affairs and challenges both the dom-<br/>inant ‘resource curse’ and more critical ‘extractivism’ narratives about resource<br/>exporters like Bolivia by focusing on what resources become. Natural resources<br/>are priced, purchased, and sold in world money – in the twentieth-first cen-<br/>tury, United States (US) dollars. This forces countries to hoard US dollars, which<br/>are usually only obtainable through exporting natural resources, and to spend<br/>hard-earnt US dollars on imports. This both leaves resource exporters exposed<br/>to changes on the world market driven by events elsewhere in the world, and<br/>exposed to foreign exchange crises when they cannot access dollars. Through<br/>this lens, the predicament which Bolivia finds itself confronting today appears<br/>as a product of the Bolivian state’s attempts to manage the transmutation of<br/>hydrocarbons into world money and back again. The simple fact that natural<br/>resource rents accumulate in world money is a vital yet often overlooked part<br/>of how inequality manifests on the world market.