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Why being endowed with oil is not always a boon: the case of Nigeria and Angola

Why being endowed with oil is not always a boon: the case of Nigeria and Angola

ROSS HARVEY, Senior Research Associate, Institute for the Future of Knowledge, University of Johannesburg IN countries with weak governance institutions, natural resource wealth tends to be a curse instead of a blessing. Where citizens are relatively powerless to hold ruling elites to account, resource wealth undermines development prospects. On the contrary, where citizens are able to exert constraints on executive power, resource wealth can generate development that benefits ordinary citizens. Development scholar Richard Auty first coined the term ‘resource curse’ in the early 1990s. He used the phrase to describe the puzzling phenomenon of resource wealthy countries failing to industrialise.…
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