Since the 1960s the resource-poor countries have grown much faster than the resource-rich ones. This reflects basic differences in the speed of industrialization and the nature of the political state that are rooted in the natural resource endowment. Most resource-rich countries experienced a...

Rents tend to be relatively high in developing countries and also very fungible, so that differences in the scale of the rent and in its distribution among economic agents profoundly affect the nature of the political state and the development trajectory. This paper identifies two basic...