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

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