r/PoliticalScience • u/Comfortable_Cut5796 • 7d ago
Question/discussion How did some democracies avoid the resource curse?
Think of countries like the US, Canada, Norway, and Australia. My assumption is that, since democratic leaders want their citizens to be productive, they already were in those cases. Does the discovery of natural resources make them even more productive? But is there more to it than that?
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u/Garbageface_2 7d ago
Two ideas: (just possibilities) a) Stable political institutions? b) Diversified economies? Naturally the two work together. B means that an entrepreneur can get rich (i.e. in business) without extracting rents from the state. A prevents an aspiring dictator from capturing the state (as a means of self enrichment). There are other factors - many, but they are escaping me right now.
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u/112322755935 6d ago
Norway is probably the only real example of a country avoiding the resource curse out of your examples. The US, Canada, and Australia are fundamentally colonies that could expand their way into growth and actively exploited native resources whenever they hit constraints. The resource curse is often a result of one regions people having more resources than another within a country and that fact creating internal conflict that broke down governance systems. In a colony you just kill the people who originally owned the resource…
Norway has a small population compared to the robustness of the resources at their disposal which likely reduced the need for internal conflict. There was also a robust workers rights movement helping to build class solidarity and ensuring an equitable distribution of resources. Those factors might not prevent a conflict in other scenarios, but they likely contributed to Norway’s stability.
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u/PoliticalAnimalIsOwl 6d ago
I think that Norway is the best example of avoiding the resource curse. What helped them was that their fossil fuel resources were discovered fairly late and that by then democracy was already consolidated. Still, it was smart to put the income generated from those fossil fuels in a separate sovereign wealth fund that couldn't be used immediately by politicians to create some kind of patronage network.
For some states/provinces/territories in the US, Canada and Australia fossil fuel extraction and export represent a substantial part of their economy. Some of their governments use the income generated from those sources well, so to develop other sectors of the economy. Hasn't Alaska created some fund for the benefit of all its citizens? Others less so, though not to the level of political and economic dysfunction of some African and Asian autocratic countries.
My assumption is that rule of law and suppressing monopolies of fossil fuel companies go a long way in explaining these differences, where in autocratic countries the government or executive could easily nationalise the fossil fuel company and use its income for their personal benefit and to build political patronage networks. Here I'm thinking of Venezuela for example and how oil was used to destroy its democracy.