March 11, 2012
It’s Sunday, which means that Thomas Friedman will be proudly pushing some misguided thesis in his NYT column. Today’s topic is the resource curse.
Friedman points to a graph that the OECD has constructed showing the relationship between the share of natural resource rents in national income and a country’s student test scores. The graph shows a strong negative relationship, meaning that the more resources a country has, the worse the test scores.
Friedman’s take away from this story is that if you don’t have natural wealth then you have no choice but to work and study hard. He holds up Taiwan, which is one of the richest countries in the world, despite the lack of major resource deposits and being a regular victim of catastrophic storms.
While working and studying hard might be good advice in general, there is a small problem with Friedman’s story. The basic measure of resource wealth in this story, resource rents as a percent of national income, is not an independent measure of resource wealth.
There are many countries that are very resource rich (e.g. the United States) where natural resources are not an especially large share of national income precisely because they have been successful. In other words, there is a serious bias to this measure.
If two countries have the same amount of resources, the one with a lower ratio of resource rents to national income will be the one that has been more successful developing other parts of its economy. This means that the analysis that Friedman is touting is essentially telling us that successful countries have been successful.
Research that has attempted to just examine resource wealth, without comparing it to national income, has found that there is actually a positive relationship between resource endowment and national income. In other words, when the extraction of natural resources is well-managed to the benefit of the country, it makes a positive contribution to growth. But studying hard is still good advice.
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