Scott Beaulier is proud to serve as the H.A. (Dave) True Family Dean of Business. Over his decades-long career in higher education leadership, Scott has built a track record of developing business programs that fuse the structure of the classroom with the realities of business in the 21st century. Prior to joining the University of Wyoming, Scott served as the Ronald & Kaye Olson Dean of Business at North Dakota State University (NDSU). During his tenure, Scott led the undergraduate and graduate College of Business programs to achieve many historic successes.

Before his role at NDSU, Scott served as Executive Director at the Center for the Study of Economic Liberty in the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. From 2010 to 2015, Scott served as Executive Director of the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University. Under his leadership, the Johnson Center grew into a robust academic center: In just three years, Scott recruited seven top-notch Ph.D. economists to the campus and expanded the program offerings to include both a major and a Master of Arts in economics.

In addition to leading the Johnson Center, Scott served as Chair of the Division of Economics and Finance at Troy University and, earlier in his career at Mercer University, was the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Capitalism, Chair of the Economics Department, and Director of the Center for Undergraduate Research in Public Policy & Capitalism. Scott earned an undergraduate degree from Northern Michigan University and a Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University. In an exclusive interview He answered our questions like the following:

Gulan: Your research highlights how important institutional and political underpinnings are in determining long-term development results. What, in your opinion, separates institutions that just maintain stability from those that actively produce inclusive and self-reinforcing economic growth—and how can emerging nations break free from institutional equilibria that seem stable but actually impede prosperity?

Professor Dr. Scott Beaulier: Institutions that merely preserve stability often do just enough to prevent collapse. They reduce uncertainty at the margins, but they do not create the conditions for broad-based investment, entrepreneurship, and long-term planning. By contrast, growth-producing institutions do more than maintain order: they protect property, constrain predation, create reasonably predictable rules, and give people confidence that success will not simply be confiscated later.

That is the key distinction. Stability alone is not enough. Many societies are “stable” in the sense that elites understand the rules of the game and can reproduce them over time. But if those rules channel rewards toward patronage, favoritism, and rent-seeking, then the equilibrium may be stable while still being deeply anti-development.

To break out of that kind of equilibrium, emerging nations need more than a new policy package. They need changes that alter expectations. Citizens, investors, and political actors must begin to believe that productive activity will be rewarded more reliably than political access. That usually requires visible constraints on arbitrary state action, greater security of property, and institutional reforms that make promises more credible over time. In my Botswana work, that was always the central point: development is not just about adopting pro-growth policies on paper, but about making those policies believable and durable.

Gulan: Although institutional frameworks are frequently cited as important forces behind sustained economic growth, many reform initiatives fall short of bringing about long-lasting change. How much do you think informal norms, political incentives, and historical path dependencies are more important for successful institutional development than formal policy design? Can these deeper forces be purposefully changed, or must they emerge naturally over time?

Professor Dr. Scott Beaulier: They are enormously important—often more important than formal design alone. Formal rules matter, of course, but they operate inside a larger political and cultural setting. A constitution can promise restraint, but if political actors see the state primarily as a tool for distributing favors, those formal rules will be bent, ignored, or hollowed out.

This is one reason many reform efforts fail. Policymakers often focus on importing formal institutions—new laws, new agencies, new anti-corruption bodies—without changing the incentive structure facing those who must operate them. Informal norms and political expectations determine whether formal rules become meaningful constraints or simply decorative language.

That said, I would not say these deeper forces must emerge “naturally” in some passive sense. They can be influenced, but usually indirectly and gradually. Reforms that improve transparency, reduce discretionary authority, strengthen competition, and reward productive activity can help reshape norms over time. But this is rarely quick. Path dependence matters because people learn from history. If a state has repeatedly broken promises, then new commitments will not be trusted immediately. Credibility has to be earned. That was part of Botswana’s achievement: not just announcing sensible rules, but building a track record that caused citizens and outsiders to revise their expectations.

Gulan: Botswana is frequently cited as an example of "textbook" African excellent administration. How far, in your opinion, does this story oversimplify the more complex political economic dynamics that underpinned its success?

Professor Dr. Scott Beaulier: It oversimplifies it quite a bit. Botswana is indeed a success story, especially relative to many post-colonial states, but the danger is that it can be turned into a cartoon: good leaders, good policies, diamonds, and therefore growth. That misses the more interesting political economy.

Botswana’s success was not simply the presence of good intentions. It was the interaction of political institutions, norms of restraint, and policy choices that made growth-compatible behavior more attractive than predatory behavior. The deeper story is about how Botswana avoided the common post-independence pattern in which political leaders centralized authority, weakened constraints, and used the state as a machine for redistribution to political allies.

So yes, Botswana is a valuable case, but not because it offers a simplistic formula. It is valuable because it shows how fragile development is, and how rare it is for a political system to align incentives in favor of long-term wealth creation rather than short-term extraction. That is why I have always treated Botswana less as a miracle and more as an illustration of how political institutions can shape the incentives that determine whether growth takes root.

Gulan: What proportion of Botswana's achievements may be attributed to intentional institutional design as opposed to historically dependent elements like timing, geography, or leadership?

Professor Dr. Scott Beaulier: The honest answer is that it was a combination, and it would be a mistake to assign a precise percentage. My own emphasis has always been that Botswana’s success cannot be reduced either to luck or to pure design.

Historical conditions mattered. Leadership mattered. Timing mattered. The country was not operating in a vacuum. But what is most striking is that Botswana responded to those conditions unusually well. Many countries receive favorable opportunities and still squander them. Botswana did not. That is why I put so much emphasis on post-colonial policy and political institutions in my earlier work. Diamonds alone do not explain Botswana, because resources in many places have encouraged rent-seeking and conflict rather than development.

So I would frame it this way: history and circumstance created an opportunity set, but intentional institutional choices determined whether that opportunity set would be used productively. Leadership helped translate inherited advantages into durable rules, rather than treating them as a short-term windfall.

Gulan: Your study frequently emphasizes how important credible commitment is to economic growth. What, particularly in the early years following independence, gave Botswana's administration credibility in the eyes of citizens and investors?

Professor Dr. Scott Beaulier: Credible commitment emerges when political actors convince others that restraint today will still hold tomorrow. In Botswana’s case, credibility came from a combination of signals and performance.

First, the government did not behave as though independence was a license for unchecked political extraction. That mattered. Early policy choices signaled that the state would not simply expropriate wealth, punish success, or continuously rewrite the rules.

Second, Botswana developed a reputation for prudence and relative restraint. Investors and citizens do not need perfection; they need reasonable confidence that the government will not arbitrarily reverse course. Botswana began to build that confidence through repeated actions that aligned with its stated commitments.

Third, the political framework was supportive of those commitments. In the Constitutional Political Economy piece, the emphasis was not just on economic policy in isolation, but on the political foundations that made those policies sustainable. Credibility comes from institutions that make promises costly to break. Botswana was unusual because its political order did a comparatively good job of binding leaders to a more predictable developmental path.

Gulan: Is it possible for resource-rich nations to develop robust institutions without a history of restriction, or was Botswana's development particularly path-dependent?

Professor Dr. Scott Beaulier: It is possible, but very difficult. Resource wealth can either finance development or undermine it. Without prior constraint—or without rapidly developed substitutes for it—resource revenues often intensify the struggle to control the state. That is the classic resource curse dynamic.

Botswana was certainly path dependent in important ways. Its prior norms, political structure, and leadership choices mattered greatly. But I would not say that makes Botswana irrelevant to other resource-rich states. The lesson is not that others must duplicate Botswana’s exact history. The lesson is that resource wealth is most dangerous when it arrives before meaningful limits on political discretion. If political actors can capture mineral wealth with little accountability, the incentive to build broad-based institutions is weakened.

So yes, strong institutions can emerge without a long prior history of restraint, but doing so generally requires deliberate efforts to impose discipline on the use of resource revenues and to prevent those revenues from becoming the foundation of a rentier political bargain. Botswana shows that resource wealth does not doom a country—but it also shows that avoiding the curse requires institutions that can channel wealth through rules rather than through patronage.

Gulan: A common counterexample to the resource curse is Botswana. Did resource riches precede institutions, in your opinion, or did resource management itself contribute to the development of institutions?

Professor Dr. Scott Beaulier: The relationship was reciprocal, but institutions came first in the logically important sense. Botswana needed an institutional environment capable of handling resource wealth without turning it into a source of instability and predation. In that sense, diamonds did not create the original rules of restraint. Rather, existing political institutions and norms shaped how diamonds were managed.

At the same time, successful resource management can reinforce institutions. When citizens observe that revenues are handled prudently and that growth follows, that can strengthen legitimacy and deepen support for rule-based governance. So I would not treat the relationship as one-way.

Still, if forced to choose, I would say institutions were prior in the decisive sense. Natural resources are inert unless filtered through political incentives. My Botswana research pushed back against the view that the country succeeded simply because it was lucky enough to have diamonds. Many countries have had valuable resources. Botswana mattered because it managed them in a way that supported, rather than undermined, long-run development.

Gulan: Despite its achievements, Botswana still has to deal with issues including economic diversification and inequality. Do these problems highlight the institutional model's shortcomings?

Professor Dr. Scott Beaulier: They do not negate the model, but they do reveal its limits. Botswana’s institutions were remarkably successful at generating order, growth, and relative policy prudence compared with many peers. That is a major accomplishment. But it does not follow that those same institutions would automatically solve every later-stage development challenge.

Diversification is hard for many resource-rich economies precisely because initial success in one sector can create dependence, both economically and politically. Inequality also can persist even under a broadly growth-friendly institutional framework. So these are not trivial problems.

That said, I would be careful about calling them evidence of failure. It is more accurate to say they reflect the difference between building the foundations of development and solving every distributional and structural challenge that follows. Botswana’s model was especially strong at avoiding predation and encouraging stability and growth. That does not mean it was guaranteed to produce a highly diversified economy or perfect equality. Institutions can be strong in one dimension and still face serious stresses in another.

Gulan: Could Botswana’s model of resource governance realistically be replicated in today’s geopolitical and economic context?  And considering the political economies of Middle Eastern states, what are the most transferable lessons from Botswana—and what lessons are not transferable?

Professor Dr. Scott Beaulier: Botswana’s model cannot be copied mechanically. Institutional models are always embedded in local political and historical conditions. What can be transferred are principles, not blueprints.

The most transferable lesson is that resource wealth should be governed by predictable, rules-based arrangements rather than by opaque discretion. Countries do better when leaders treat natural resource revenues as a national asset to be stewarded, not a prize to be distributed for political loyalty. Closely related is the importance of credible commitment: investors and citizens need confidence that the rules will not shift arbitrarily.

Another transferable lesson is that political institutions matter more than technocratic policy design alone. Many states can hire excellent advisers and draft sophisticated plans. The harder question is whether the governing system gives rulers incentives to follow those plans when short-term political temptations arise.

For Middle Eastern political economies in particular, Botswana’s biggest lesson may be that durable prosperity requires moving from personalized or discretionary governance toward more impersonal rule-based governance. That includes clearer property protections, fewer arbitrary interventions, and stronger constraints on predatory rent distribution.

What is less transferable are the specific historical and social conditions that helped Botswana. You cannot replicate its exact leadership, timing, political bargains, or inherited norms. And countries with deeply entrenched rentier systems may find it much harder to implement Botswana-like discipline because resource wealth is already central to regime maintenance. So the lesson is not “become Botswana.” It is to understand why Botswana worked: restraint, credible commitment, and institutions that made productive activity safer than political extraction.