The Political Economy of Government Revenues in Post-Conflict Resource-Rich Africa: Liberia and Sierra Leone

Victor Davies and Sylvain Dessy ()

No 18539, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper examines the post-war strategies of Liberia and Sierra Leone to generate revenues from their natural resources. We document the challenges faced by the government of the two countries, contrasting measures taken to address these challenges as well as the outcomes. We complement the analysis with an analytical model which explores the implications of exploiting natural resources in the aftermath of a civil conflict before public management institutions are developed, as observed in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The key lesson is that resource-rich countries emerging from conflict face a difficult trade-off between relatively large longer-term gains which accrue when institutional capacity is developed prior to exploiting the resources, and smaller short-term revenues that come with immediate exploitation of the resources. The findings call attention to the potential role of the international community in developing post-conflict countries' natural resource and revenue institutional capacity, as well as transparent corporate and government institutions for resource management.

JEL-codes: O11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev and nep-res
Note: POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as The Political Economy of Government Revenues in Postconflict Resource-Rich Africa: Liberia and Sierra Leone , Victor A. B. Davies, Sylvain Dessy. in African Successes, Volume I: Government and Institutions , Edwards, Johnson, and Weil. 2016

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18539.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: The Political Economy of Government Revenues in Postconflict Resource-Rich Africa: Liberia and Sierra Leone (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18539

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18539

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().