Context Matters – Rethinking the Resource Curse in Sub-Saharan Africa

Matthias Basedau
Additional contact information
Matthias Basedau: Deutsches Übersee-Institut

Economic History from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from a bad reputation. Oil and diamonds, particularly, have been blamed for a number of Africa’s illnesses such as poverty, corruption, dictatorship and war. This paper outlines the different areas and transmission channels of how this so-called “resource curse” is said to materialize. By assessing empirical evidence on sub-Saharan Africa it concludes that the resource curse theory fails to sufficiently explain why and how several countries have not or only partly been affected by the “curse”. Theoretically, the paper argues that whether or not natural resources are detrimental to a country’s socio-economic and political development depends on a number of contextual variables, divided into country-specific conditions and resource-specific conditions (type, degree/level of abundance and dependence, resource revenue management, involved companies etc.). Methodologically, a future research agenda needs to examine the complex interplay of these contextual variables by adding sophisticated comparative research designs, especially “small and medium N” comparisons, to the tool box which has been widely confined to the juxtaposition of “large N” and country case studies.

Keywords: Sub-Saharan Africa; Natural Resources, Political Economy, Institutions, Violent Conflict, Socio-Economic Development; Democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B25 N5 N57 O13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2005-08-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev and nep-ene
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 46
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/eh/papers/0508/0508002.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:wpa:wuwpeh:0508002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic History from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).