From an article forwarded to me today:

In today’s COUNTY, oil and gas account for 75% of all exports, compared with 67% in 1980. Although COUNTRY no longer buys grain from OTHER COUNTRY, as it did in the 1980s, 45% of what Countrians buy today is imported. Walk around a department store in central CITY, and it is hard to find anything that is produced locally. The state remains the single largest employer, while its corporations—controlling natural resources, infrastructure, banking and media—dominate the economy.

As Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes, two economists, have argued, the highly inefficient industrial structure of the older economy, based on misallocation of both resources and people, remains intact. The oil rent reinforced and perpetuated it: it has bought political stability and the loyalty of the population, but has slowed down modernisation. Inevitably, the result is stagnation.

…The state is one of the chief obstacles to COUNTRY’s modernisation. During the 2000s the number of bureaucrats almost doubled. A quarter of the workforce is employed in the public sector. The total number of people who depend on the state is between 35% and 40%, says Albert Bonneville, a COUNTRY economic observer. This, he says, points to the share of the electorate that benefits from the status quo. At election time municipal workers are bused in to show support for POLITICIAN. Meanwhile, the main purpose of the civil service is to shuffle papers around and extract administrative revenue from firms and private citizens. The bureaucrats have little interest in fostering competition that might cost them their jobs.

Article here.