Research Summary 21, The Political Economy of the Resource Curse: A Literature Survey. IDS Working Paper No. 268

Abstract

This paper evaluates the literature on the \"resource curse,\" a concept which emerged in the late 1980s alleging that natural resource abundance leads to a host of negative economic, political, and social outcomes. This theory, which directly opposed the prior conventional wisdom that natural resources were good for development, has now been adopted as the new orthodoxy and is espoused by such bodies as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

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Citation

Brighton, UK: Institute of Development Studies, 2 pp.

Research Summary 21, The Political Economy of the Resource Curse: A Literature Survey. IDS Working Paper No. 268

Published 1 January 2006