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Kiren Aziz Chaudhry

Associate Professor of Political Science

Professor Chaudhry teaches in the fields of comparative politics, the political economy of development, and the Middle East. Professor Chaudry received her B.A. from the University of Michigan, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her publications include The Price of Wealth (1997); "The Myths of the Market and the Common History of Late Developers," Politics and Society (1993); "Economic Liberalizations and the Lineages of the Rentier State", Comparative Politics (1993); and "The Price of Wealth: Business and State in Labor Remittance and Oil Economics," International Organization (1989).
View her curriculum vitae (September 2005) in PDF format.

The Price of Wealth: Economies and Institutions in the Middle East (1997)

The emerging consensus that institutions shape political and economic outcomes has produced few theories of institutional change and no defensible theory of institutional origination. Kiren Aziz Chaudhry shows how state and market institutions are created and transformed in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, two countries that typify labor and oil exporters in the developing worlds.

In a world where the international economy dramatically affects domestic developments, the question of where institutions come from becomes at once more urgent and more complex. In both Saudi Arabia and Yemen, fundamental state and market institutions forged during a period of isolation at the end of World War I were destroyed and reshaped not once but three times in response to exogenous shocks. Comparing boom-bust cycles, Chaudhry exposes the alternating social and organizational origins of institutions, arguing that both broad changes in the international economy and specific forms of international integration shape institutional outcomes. Labor and oil exporters thus experience identical economic cycles but generate radically different state, market, and financial institutions in response to different resource flows.

Chaudhry supplemented years of field work in Saudi Arabia and Yemen with extensive analysis of previously unavailable materials in the Saudi national archives.

"It is hard to know where to begin in praise of Kiren Chaudhry's The Price of Wealth. Phrases, at once common and hyperbolic, come to mind: exhaustively researched, empirically rich, theoretically challenging. In Chaudhry's case there is simply no hyperbole involved. Chaudhry subjects macro-economic and political theory to the merciless scrutiny of solid inductive analysis. Any students of political economy will read this book with benefit."
—John Waterbury, Princeton University