EARTH 104 Module 12 Resource Curse
PRESENTER: This is a redrawn figure from Saxon Warner a famous paper from back in 2001. Each dot
here is a country. And what we have at the bottom is how much of the economy of that country was exports
of natural resources in the year 1970. So the countries that exported a lot of natural resources are out here.
The countries with very little natural resources as a fraction of the total economy are down there. And then
what's shown here is how much did that economy grow over the next 20 years.
What you'll notice is that all of the countries that really relied on exporting natural resources in 1970 had
very slow or actually negative growth over the next 20 years. Some countries that did not have many
natural resources also had slow growth, but all of the countries with fast growth did not rely on natural
resources.
Now a correlation does not tell you what caused it, but there are enough reasons to believe that when you
rely really heavily on unnatural resources there may be a tendency to work hard to control the natural
resource rather than to building a wonderful place for everyone to live. And if that's true then there may be
some relationship in here that is meaningful and reliance on the natural resources may not be a good thing
for having a big healthy economy.