2021. Are petroleum riches a curse? Is a country finding itself in possession of abundant oil and gas like the proverbial lottery winner—destined for unhappiness? In this essay, I evaluate the literature that claims there is a negative relationship between resource abundance and economic and political development.
Introduction
Do petroleum resource endowments help or hamper political and economic development? This is a question that many scholars have pondered, and those who have an unfavourable view of the effects of petroleum riches have assembled a voluminous literature on what is known as the “resource curse.” The resource curse thesis holds that there is a “counterintuitive” or “paradoxical” relationship between natural resource endowments and poor economic (and political) performance.[1] This relationship – between resource endowments and economic (and political) development – is the focus of the resource curse literature and this essay. However, what remains unsaid, but always implied, is that one can say something in general about this relationship between natural resources and economic development. This essay argues against this proposition. The relationship between the two can only be meaningfully investigated when one specifies the when, where, and who of the relationship, in others words, when one has specified the socio-economic-political-historical context of the relationship. This essay will critique the resource curse literature and the assumption that it can or cannot be validated. It will do so by a general and theoretical discussion of the problem, and then by examining two cases of hydrocarbon-rich countries in very different contexts, to show how important it is to specify the context of the petro-development relationship.
Theoretical discussion
In this theoretical section I will discuss four types problems with the resource curse literature: measurement problems, contextual problems, teleological problems, and methodological nationalism.
Measurement problems
One of the key problems in the literature is how resource endowments is defined and measured. As has been noted by Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008, 249), “the common proxy for resource abundance in the literature on the curse is rather peculiar. It is defined as the ratio of resource exports to GDP,” which they argue is more of “a measure of dependence (or intensity) than … a measure of abundance.” Although the ratio of resource exports to GDP is not always used, many other studies use a similar proxy which measure resource wealth in comparison to GDP or exports, thereby measuring resource dependence instead of resource endowments (Badeeb et al. 2017, 128). The problem with examining the relationship between resource dependence and economic development is that resource dependence can to some extent be defined as economic underdevelopment. Rondo Cameron and Larry Neal, in their Concise Economic History of the World (2003, 9), define “economic development” as “economic growth accompanied by a substantial structural or organizational change in the economy,” such as a shift from the primary to secondary and tertiary sectors. If a country remains dependent on its resource-extraction sector, i.e. its primary sector, then it is almost by definition not developing economically.
Contextual problems
What is meant by “contextual problems” with the resource curse literature is that when the specific mechanisms channelling the resource curse are explained, it turns out that it is not resources that are the problem, but the specific conditions under which they are found, extracted, and traded. I will attempt to demonstrate this by discussing the various mechanisms through which the resource curse is supposed to operate, as listed by Badeeb et al. (2016). The first mechanism they discuss is the Dutch disease, whereby a boom in natural resource discoveries or exports lead to a shift towards the resource sector and a real exchange rate appreciation which decreases the country’s non-resource exports, thereby hampering its competitiveness and growth.
However, this effect is highly contingent on other factors, such as the size and diversity of the economy in question, and its state policies, which may or may not vaccinate the country against the Dutch Disease. For example, a study of the effect of North Sea petroleum on the UK and Norway found “only weak evidence of a Dutch disease in the UK, whereas manufacturing output in Norway has actually benefited from energy discoveries and higher oil prices” (Bjørnland 1998, 553). Another study, which examined the effect of “giant oil and gas discoveries” on a country’s real exchange rate, did indeed find evidence of the Dutch disease, but in a context where the discovery constituted the “equivalent in value to 10% of a country’s GDP,” no small qualification (Harding et al. 2020). Moreover, as Gylfason (2006) points out, the Dutch quickly recovered from the disease, and in 2019 the country ranked fourth on both the Global Innovation Index and the Global Competitiveness Index (Kraaijenbrink 2020). This shows, in my interpretation, that there is no general resource curse effect working through the Dutch disease, but that specific small/medium economies, governed by specific state policies, under specific circumstances (e.g. widespread international trade of petroleum at prices which enable high returns) may for a specific duration of time experience an economic shift which is not conducive to economic growth.
The second mechanism is “the volatile nature of natural resource prices in global markets” (Badeeb et al. 2017, 125). Volatile petroleum prices cast uncertainty over future revenues and make it difficult for petroleum endowed or dependent countries to make effective plans for economic development. Subsidiary problems may include an inability to engage in counter-cyclical spending when prices fall, and an inability to pay back loans taken on in times of high resource prices. These problems do not stem from natural resources as such, but from how the markets are structured, and how the states in question handle their revenue from petroleum exports. For example, oil prices have in recent decades been highly volatile, but they were not so from the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the 70s. Moreover, petroleum export revenues can be saved to compensate for shortfalls during downturns, and they can be spent on education and projects to industrialize or diversify the economy, so that it is less subject to the price swings of a particular commodity.
van der Ploeg and Poelhekkef (2009, 754) argue that the resource curse “is foremost a problem of volatility,” and that the curse can even be turned into “a blessing, because we find evidence for a positive direct effect of natural resource dependence on growth after controlling for volatility.” However, they, like many others, examine dependence on resource exports, not resource wealth or abundance. Moreover, they find that the correlation between resource dependence, volatility, and low growth also holds for other primary goods such as copper, coffee, foods, etc., suggesting that the problem is not so much one of possession of resources, but rather a disproportionate reliance on primary goods exports which are subject to price swings. This leaves us with an unsurprising correlation between overreliance on the exports of primary goods, i.e. a lack of economic diversification, and sub-standard growth.
It is also not obvious that it is the volatility of natural resource prices that poses problems, for an IMF working paper by Arezki et al. (2011, 10) has found evidence suggesting that “on average the prices of individual primary commodities might be less volatile than those of individual manufactured goods.” Their findings suggest that “specialization in the manufacturing sector does not necessarily yield less volatility,” but that it could actually increase exposure to volatility. They further suggest that manufacturing might even be more difficult than specialization in commodity production, “perhaps because it requires constant upgrading of the production process to meet international competition through product upgrading” (10). Finally, they make the point that “managing external volatility and economic diversification in the long run remain an important policy challenge for developing countries, but this is not because commodity prices per se are more volatile” (10, emphasis added).
Here we see that it is overreliance on certain primary products which is the key problem, and that the volatility is associated with a lack of economic diversification, not the possession of natural resources as such. A more plausible mechanism through which the resource curse might operate is the deteriorating terms of trade of primary commodities. If Harvey et al.’s analysis is correct, and there is a “strong negative relationship between long-run relative commodity prices and long-run economic growth,” then this might be an argument against specializing in the resource-sector generally (2017, 27). However, they also point out that the trend of falling relative prices of primary commodities “since 1870 appears to be conditioned on an approximate separation between an industrial core that imports primary commodities and a non-industrialised poor periphery that supplies them,” and that this trend might be reversed in the event that developing countries succeed in creating “permanently diversified economies, with rising real wages and some global market power” (2017, 33). Thus, even this potential mechanism of the resource curse turns out to be highly contingent on other factors.
The next three mechanisms that Badeeb et al. present are “economic mismanagement,” “rent seeking,” and “corruption and institutional quality,” all of which are connected (2017, 126). Resource incomes may provide regimes with “fiscal cushions” that enable them to ignore pressures to modernize, industrialize, urbanize, etc. Without the need for effective taxation, governments may be more unaccountable and act more irresponsibly. A population that can expect stable and relatively high incomes from the resource or state sector of a petro-state might have reduced “incentives to accumulate human capital” (ibid., 126). As significant petroleum endowments tend to offer vast rent incomes, the state or contenting political groups will try to tap into these rents, and this may lead to patronage networks and the purchase and sale of political loyalty, but it might also spur conflict.[2] However, as many studies find, institutions play a key role in determining what the effect of resources will be on the factors listed above (Mehlum et al. 2006; Mavrotas et al. 2011; Torvik 2009; Sarmidi et al. 2014).
Arezki and Gylfason suggests that “the mechanisms through which resource rents affect corruption cannot be separated from political systems” (2011, 1). It seems to me that what one is left with is the idea that access to large rents can have a corrupting effect, but that the effect depends on the corruptness or corruptibility of the rulers or governments in question. However, it is plausible that the higher the actual or potential rents in question, the higher is the corrupting effect of those rents. Just like hydropower-projects may breed corruption through the huge sums of money that can potentially be embezzled (Sovacool and Walter 2019, 58-9), so petroleum rents breed corruption through the high sums of money that can be embezzled or appropriated. The problem, then, is not that the resources are resources, whether renewable or not, but that they yield such high returns relative to cost of extraction, providing “easy money” that corruptible rulers and governments may decide to use for purposes other than facilitating growth and development. One of these purposes, as Michael L. Ross (2015) notes, is the maintenance of authoritarian political control, which is facilitated by the control of huge resource rents.
Teleological problems
What I call teleological problems is the assumption that creeps up in the resource curse literature that states with natural resource wealth “should do or have done better.” As Badeeb et al. (2017, 124) write, “the resource curse literature only attempts to explain why many resource-curse states experience failure in development.” For example, one of the authors they cite writes that “Countries dependent on oil … have performed far worse than they should have, given their revenue streams” (cited in Badeeb et al. 2017, 127).
This way of looking at the effects of resource abundance or dependence is misleading, as it presupposes that such countries should be able to do well given their resource-based incomes. However, economic development is neither natural nor easy. As developmental economist Robert H. Wade writes, “the evidence points to the sheer difficulty facing ‘developing countries’ in achieving ‘developed country’ economic structure and performance” (2016, 24). Yifu Lin and Rosenblatt (2012, 175) have found much the same, writing that “only a handful of developing countries have succeeded in reaching high levels of prosperity, and many of them are in Western Europe.”
Methodological nationalism
Finally, the resource curse literature suffers from a curse of its own: methodological nationalism. Gavin Bridge writes that despite the debate within the resource curse literature, “on both sides of the debate there is a default to national-scale modes of analysis that pushes questions about the transnational organization of production into the background” (2008, 393). One of the key aspects of hydrocarbons is the global extent of their markets, particularly oil, which Bridge notes is “the largest internationally traded commodity by both volume and value” (2008, 395). Emphasizing the international and networked nature of the international oil industry, Bridge points to the importance of analysing relations of power that cut across national borders. Who comes out on top in the hydrocarbon commodity chain reflects a “balance of power between different actors in the chain” (Bridge 2008, 408). Whether oil endowments are good for development or not will to a large degree depend on the country’s relative power and position in the global oil commodity chain.
Case studies
Iraq during the interwar years
While the territory of the state Iraq has a long and complex history, dating back to the earliest civilizations known to history, the modern state of Iraq was principally a British creation (Dodge, 2003). The creation of modern Iraq stemmed from the Anglo-French wartime agreements to divide large parts of the Middle East among themselves. “Of all the major states in the Middle East,” writes Simon Bromley,
Iraq faced the most formidable obstacles to state formation. While the presence of a notable class, British control and a Sunni bureaucracy and ulema suggests some parallels with Egypt, the sheer arbitrariness of the country’s formation, together with the absence of any developed tradition of state stability and the degree of ethnic and religious heterogeneity (both a sharp contrast with Turkey and Egypt), produced an extremely refractory inheritance for state-building. (1994, 135)
Part of the reason for Iraq’s creation was Britain’s need to access Iraq’s vast oil reserves, particularly in the event of war, as oil had by the First World War become crucial to the British navy. As secretary to the cabined Maurice Hankey had noted during the war: “the retention of the oil-bearing regions in Mesopotamia and Persia in British hands, as well as a proper strategic boundary to cover them, would appear to be a first class British war aim” (cited in Bromley 1994, 77-8).
Iraqi oil was initially to be shared by British, Dutch, French, and Iraqi interests, but due to American agitation, Rockefeller-associated interests were granted a share in the Iraqi Petroleum Company (IPC) instead of the Iraqis (Mitchell 2013, 95-6). The Iraqi government was in a weak position, it needed finances and feared that Mosul might be given to Turkey, and therefore yielded in 1925. This enabled the continuation of the existing policy on the part of the major oil companies: to delay oil production in Iraq so as to maintain high oil prices. This policy dated all the way back to the early 1900s, when the major oil producers of Western Europe bought exclusive exploration rights in Iraq, Persia, and Egypt to prevent competitors from producing cheap oil from the Middle East (Mitchell 2013, 46-7).
In 1931, the Iraqi government again yielded to the IPC, giving the international oil companies even better terms in exchange for advances on future royalty payments. The deal was described by a US State Department official as “one of the worst oil deals that has ever been signed” (cited in Parra 2004, 13). Iraq even surrendered the right to tax the IPC’s profits, instead accepting a fixed royalty fee, leaving “the government far more dependent on the Company,” which could decide how much oil to produce according to its own interests rather than Iraq’s (Sluglett 2007, 73).
While British dominance of the Iraqi oil industry up to 1971 is widely acknowledged (Sluglett 2007, 75), virtually no attempt has been made to explain how Iraq’s royalty revenues compared with the profits of the IPC during the interwar years. Besides the question of delayed development of the oil resources, how big of a share Iraq got from the profits of its oil is important to understand Iraq’s relation to the oligopolistic international oil industry. The most useful data are presented in F. K. Al-Khalil’s thesis on oil revenues and development in Iraq. Before 1951, he writes, Iraq received a royalty of “4 shillings (gold) per ton of crude oil produced,” but after 1951, when the profits from production were to be “divided equally between the government and the companies,” Iraq’s share rose to “about 40 shillings per long ton of crude oil produced” (Al-Khalil 1958, 12). Assuming that after 1951, total profits were at around 80 shillings per ton of oil produced, and if oil prices were not significantly higher in the 50s than 30s (as Figure 1 indicates), then the 4 shillings-royalty might not have added up to more than 5% of the profits from IPC’s oil production. Even if we allow for a large margin of error, it seems Iraq recuperated an exceptionally small portion of the value of its oil in the interwar years.
Figure 1. Source: Holodny (2016).
In sum, what can be said about the relationship between petroleum resources and economic and political development in Iraq during the interwar years? The most striking thing is the impossibility of separating Iraq and its oil resources from geopolitics and the international oil industry. To talk about Iraqi oil during the interwar years is to simultaneously talk about Britain, the First World War, the international oil companies, and so on. It is clear that Bridge’s (2008) global production networks perspective is more useful than any conventional resource curse perspective. To me, an attempt to find any statistical relationship between Iraq’s oil abundance and economic growth or democracy would do nothing but trample on the particular circumstances of Iraq during the interwar years.
Norway from the 1960s onward
Norway’s petroleum adventure began in a different period in the history of the international petroleum industry. As Luciani (2013, 126) writes, from the 1950s, “governments of the new producing countries saw their bargaining position improve steadily,” they were “more effectively independent than before and had access to better expertise and advice.” The high returns of oil producers encouraged new entrants from which states were able to exact better terms. Moreover, the decolonization movement led to the emergence of new states that emphasized their sovereignty, which had formerly been denied, and a natural extension of this was what became known as “resource nationalism.” This term captures the idea that resources belong to the “nation,” and that these resources should be controlled, managed, and taxed by the state, considered as acting on behalf of the nation. When Norway began producing oil in the early 70s, the wave of nationalizations had swept across the main petroleum-holding regions of the world, and the idea that the Norwegian state should take no part in the industry would have seemed strange to a country that had been ruled by mostly labour governments since the Second World War. Indeed, a parliamentary committee in 1971 formulated “ten oil commandments” that were to guide Norwegian petroleum policy, the first of which reads as follows: “National direction and control must be ensured for all activity on the Norwegian continental shelf.” This idea was put into practice from the 70s onward, largely thanks to effective state institutions (Holden 2013, 872).
When oil production began in the early 70s and the price of oil rose dramatically, Norway ran the risk of getting a smaller share than other states, on account of the earlier tax and royalty agreements that had been negotiated to induce international firms to invest in the Norwegian continental shelf. To solve this problem, in 1975 the government imposed new taxes on the production of petroleum on the Norwegian shelf, amounting to a total 70-80% tax on profits from production, a rate which has remained fairly stable ever since (Ryggvik et al. 2020).
Since the 70s, the Norwegian state has successfully recuperated most of the profits from oil production on the Norwegian shelf, either through taxes, direct involvement, or passive ownership. The state and its partners also succeeded in establishing a domestic petroleum industry which is today internationally competitive. Furthermore, in 1990 the government opted to create a sovereign wealth fund. It served the same purposes as the former production and investments ceilings had, namely to safeguard the interests of future generations and to prevent the oil revenues from “overheating” the economy or causing a Dutch disease. Today, the fund is the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, and it is used to cover ordinary budget deficits while being subjected to norms, rules, and supervision that prevent opportunistic governments from using it whimsically (Holden 2013, 873).
Perhaps the most Norwegian way of illustrating how the oil wealth has impacted Norwegian development is by showing how Norway surpassed its “big brother” Sweden in terms of GDP per capita in the mid-70s, when the oil revenues started to come in, as can be seen in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2. Source: Olsen (2013).
The oil wealth has allowed the government to increase social spending without having to incur debt, and the comparatively generous welfare system has thus been supported by the petroleum revenues accruing to the state every year, constituting about a fifth of total state revenue in 2020. Without the petroleum incomes, Norwegian social spending would have to be considerably reduced. There is some truth to the argument that Norway has become too dependent on the oil sector to generate (directly and indirectly) employment and growth, but the oil fund may help offset the problems associated with a secular decline in oil production or prices. Thanks to the oil fund, Norway has, as Ryggvik et al. (2020) put it, “a far greater financial autonomy (manoeuvring space) than any other European state” (my translation).
In Norway, then, the petroleum resources have had a different effect than in Iraq. It is important to emphasize the shift in the balance of power towards resource-holding states in the 60s and 70s, and the relative weakening of the international oil majors. The Norwegian state was able to act autonomously from outside powers and firms, and set up a production regime which gave the state the vast bulk of the profits. The importance of state institutions can hardly be overstated, but their capacity to act effectively was enhanced by the widespread agreement in Norwegian society that the benefits of Norwegian petroleum was to accrue to the society as a whole. This shows, again, that the effects of petroleum resources are highly contingent.
Conclusion
In this essay, I have sought to critically evaluate the resource curse thesis. I have done so through examining the theoretical problems with the resource curse literature, which I argue include measurement problems, contextual problems (absence of context), teleological problems (assumptions of natural developments paths), and methodological nationalism (overemphasis on the nation-state as unit of analysis). I then examined two case studies to demonstrate how different the impact of petroleum resources can be in different contexts. Interwar Iraq and postwar Norway illustrate how difficult it is to make generalizable statements about the effects of petroleum resources on a country’s development. Some scholars, such as Ross and Andersen, have recognized the historical contingency of the resource curse thesis, yet they still maintain that “[just] because causal relationships are historically specific, it does not mean they are invalid” (2013, 1016).
This is true, but it still does not validate the resource curse. This is because resources as such do not have any causal effect on development, and only emerge as a factor through the various socio-political relations that transform resources into “wealth,” such as markets, corporations, industry structures, and state institutions. It seems plausible that overreliance on resource exports is a sign of underdevelopment, it is no doubt true that large resource rents spur corruption, and it is an observable pattern that many countries with substantial petroleum rents have not become economically developed. But all of this is more accurately attributed to the various social relations and structures in which the petroleum industry is embedded, rather than to the petroleum itself. A phrase attributed to Einstein captures well this essay’s criticism of the resource curse literature: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” The resource curse thesis is not wrong, but it is so simple and underspecified that it hinders rather than helps our understanding of the effects of petroleum resources on economic and political development.
[1] Badeeb et al. (2017, 124) define the term as “the paradox that countries endowed with natural resources such as oil, natural gas, minerals etc. tend to have lower economic growth and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources.”
[2] Whether resource wealth leads to conflict or not remains somewhat ambiguous (see Badeeb et al. [2017] and Arezki and Gylfason [2011]).
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Magnus F. Gjerde 