The Rise of Gazprom: Profits and Politics

Date:  September 24, 2009 Time:  4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Location:  206 Ingraham Hall Phone:  608-265-8038 Email:  wage@intl-institute.wisc.edu Sponsor:  Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia (CREECA) Co-Sponsor:  Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE), Political Economy Colloquium (PEC), Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER)

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Overview:
Gazprom is by any measure Russia's largest, most important, and most influential firm.  Gazprom could soon be, by market capitalization, the largest firm in the world, and the Russian state owns 50 percent plus one of its shares.  Is Gazprom an instrument of the Russian state?  Or is the Russian state an instrument of Gazprom?  Based on a Harvard Business School case study of Gazprom's export strategy in Europe and Asia and ongoing research, this seminar explores the balance of commercial and political motives -- and means -- in the rise of Gazprom as a major player in world energy markets.


Speaker Biography:
Rawi Abdelal is the Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. His primary expertise is international political economy, and his research focuses on the politics of globalization and the political economy of Eurasia.  Professor Abdelal is a faculty associate of Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and serves on the executive committee of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.  Abdelal currently runs the required first-year course on the political economy of globalization at HBS.

Professor Abdelal's first book, National Purpose in the World Economy, won the 2002 Shulman Prize as the outstanding book on the international relations of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He recently completed his second book, Capital Rules, which explains the evolution of the social norms and legal rules of the international financial system. Abdelal is currently at work on The Price of Power, a book that explores the relationships among political leadership, state-building, foreign investment, and geopolitics in the Russian energy sector.

In 1999 Abdelal earned a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University, where he had received an M.A. in 1997. At Cornell Abdelal's dissertation won the Kahin Prize in International Relations and the Esman Prize. He was a President's Scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he received a B.S. with highest honors in Economics in 1993. Recent honors include Harvard Business School's Robert F. Greenhill Award and the Student Association's Faculty Award for outstanding teaching in the Required Curriculum.