Natural resource wealth has often turned out to be a ‘curse’ rather than a ‘blessing’ for developing countries. Growth based exclusively on natural resources—such as oil, gas, and minerals—is often of a very narrow kind which lacks opportunities for including the poor. This condition—also called ‘the natural resource curse’ is on the focus of this project.
Natural resource wealth needs to be carefully managed if inclusive growth is to be achieved in low- and middle-income countries. Natural resources can also negatively affect the democratic process—the sector has often been associated with corruption and the non-transparent use of resource revenues for private gain instead of national development.
The project focuses on the implications of natural resources and their management for economic development—aiming to find ways in which resource wealth could be managed successfully in developing countries; for instance by using the revenues from oil, gas and minerals for development and poverty reduction.
In the light of more recent findings, the research also re-examines the notion of resource wealth as a curse in order to provide some counterbalance to the more fatalistic negative conclusions.
The project will bring together a network of researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to share accumulated knowledge on the issue. By comparing experiences of resource wealth across countries, both successes and failures, the project will build and communicate a body of knowledge which will help national policy makers and their international partners.
The project is part of a larger research project Macro-economic management (M-EM) which explores policy priorities as the global economy undergoes transformation with more countries moving from low- to middle-income status.
We examine how impact evaluation (IE) and associated syntheses contribute to evidence generation in low- and middle-income (LMIC) countries. We interviewed over 50 individuals from relevant organisations and five LMIC countries and drew on data from...
This paper explores the potential impacts of the transition to a low-carbon future for the taxation of extractive resources. The global debate on climate change has firmly moved on from the question of whether countries ought to shift towards such a...
The first objective of this paper is to update earlier assessments of mineral dependence in lower-income countries. In 2018, the mining of metals and coal continued to be an important contributor to the economies of several low- and middle-income...
The management of revenues from exhaustible natural resources involves a number of challenges. In this paper, we argue that the standard policy advice to managers of resource revenues has been dominated by short-termism and the lack of a perspective...
Modelling the underlying long-run trend of metal prices is important, given that selected metals are a source of income for many countries. However, estimating the underlying trend has proven to be difficult, given the persistence and volatility of...
The paper reviews what we know about the possibilities of designing and implementing policy measures that raise the contribution of the extractive industries’ production/consumption links to economic growth and wellbeing, and reviews how policies...
This paper provides an overview of the energy transition in Asia. It sets out the underlying drivers and how these set energy transition priorities in China, India, and South East Asia. It particularly describes the role of (liquefied) natural gas in...
Robust forecasting of mining sector revenues is key to effective budgeting (and broader fiscal management) in many resource-rich countries.However, this is challenging in practice, given commodity market volatility, the extended lags (and often...
In 2006 the Center for Global Development’s report ‘When Will We Ever Learn? Improving lives through impact evaluation’ bemoaned the lack of rigorous impact evaluations. The authors of the present paper researched international organizations and...
This paper evaluates the existence of a resource curse on political regimes using the Synthetic Control Method. Focusing on 12 countries, we compare their democracy level with the weighted democracy level of countries that have not experienced oil...
This project is part of Macro-economic management (M-EM)
Theme: 2014-18, Transformation
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