In the early 1970s, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, former Venezuelan oil minister
and founder of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), said:
Ten years from
unsecured bad credit business loans and now, twenty years from
earning extra money and now, you will see, oil brings
us ruin. It’s the devil’s excrement.
The “resource curse,” as
unsecured bad credit business loans it has come to be known, is real. Studies have
shown that the economies of resource-poor countries such as
making money in runescape Hong Kong,
Singapore, and
unsecured bad credit business loans as well South Korea have consistently outperformed those of resourcerich
countries such as
wachovia high performance money market Ghana, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and
unsecured bad credit business loans as well Zaire.
One of the extreme examples of this curse is Nigeria. Living standards in 2000
were essentially the same as
money tree plant care in 1965. The outrage is that during those 35
years, Nigeria earned $350 billion in oil revenues. Almost all of this wealth
ended up in the pockets of corrupt politicians.
The resource curse turns the Malthusian logic on its head [see the essay
on page 95, “There Are (Almost) No Limits to Economic Growth—How Technology
and Productivity Have Delivered Stunning Improvements in Living
Standards”]. In the case of the Malthusian trap, a fixed supply of natural
resources—especially agricultural output—constrains economic and
unsecured bad credit business loans as well demographic
growth. In the case of the resource curse, plentiful natural resources
actually get in the way of rapid economic development.
Why is natural resource wealth a “curse”? Let us count the ways.
The Dutch disease. This is the most benign of the problems associated
with natural resource wealth. It is named after
ask about money and the economic challenges
that faced the Netherlands after
unsecured bad credit business loans and the discovery of massive natural gas reserves
in the late 1950s. Countries that are rich in oil, gas, and
secured and unsecured credit cards as well other
minerals usually run large trade surpluses—the value of their exports is
usually much higher than the value of their imports. This almost always
leads to an appreciation of the currency of the countries in question. A
stronger currency typically makes nonresource exports (e.g., manufactured
goods) more expensive, which, in turn, retards industrial growth. Moreover,
in resource-rich economies, there are strong incentives to move resources
away from
unsecured bad credit business loans and goods-producing to extractive industries (e.g., mining
or drilling). Since the manufacturing sectors employ more human capital
and technology than the resource sectors, the Dutch disease is usually
bad news for long-term growth.