Turning Natural Resource Curse Into What It Should Be – Means to National Prosperity

Abstract

It is the irony of human nature, and indeed the incentive mechanism inherent in social institutions, that some societies less endowed by nature strive harder to improve their collective lot, and in many instances succeed in achieving their development objectives more frequently than their counterparts with more favorable allotments of natural resources. And if necessity is truly the mother of invention, then the sorry economic conditions of many resource-rich African nations may not be so ironic after all. When it comes to wasted wealth, and the problems that bedevil poor countries that are rich in natural resources, especially oil, there is plenty of blame to go around. Economists have long observed that such countries tend to do badly. In a study in 1995, Jeffrey Sachs, now of Columbia University in New York, showed that the resource-rich grow more slowly than other poor countries — even after such variables as initial per capita income and trade policies are taken into account. The usual explanation for this is “Dutch Disease”, named for the hardships that befell the Netherlands after it found North Sea gas. When a country strikes hydrocarbons, a sudden inflow of dollar-denominated revenues often leads to a sharp appreciation in the domestic currency. That tends to make non-oil sectors like agriculture and manufacturing less competitive on world markets, thus leaving oil to dominate the economy.