Many countries have failed to use natural resource wealth to promote growth and development. They have been damaged by volatility of revenues, have failed to save a sufficiently high proportion of their resource revenues and failed to make high return investments to support diversification of...

Africa is well endowed with potential for hydro and solar power, but its other endowments – shortages of capital, skills, and governance capacity – make most of the green options relatively expensive, while its abundance of hydro-carbons makes fossil fuels relatively cheap. Current power...

Natural resources account for 20% of world trade, and dominate the exports of many countries. Policy is used to manipulate both international and domestic prices of resources, yet this policy is largely outside the disciplines of the WTO. The instruments used include export taxes, price...

This paper provides an analytic review of the upstream aspects of the exploitation of natural resources: the assignment of ownership rights, taxation, the discovery process, extraction, renewability, and clean-up. It sets these issues within the principal-agent framework. It proposes that the...

Where imports are financed predominantly by rents from resource extraction or aid, the revenue generated by tariffs is illusory. Reveue earned by the tariff is offset by a reduction in the real value of aid and resource rents. Revenue is however moved between accounts in the government budget...

What are the effects of regional integration and other trade policy measures in regions such as Central Asia or the Great Lakes Region of Africa where countries are remote with poor access to the outside world and where foreign exchange earnings come largely from natural resource based exports?...

This paper addresses the efficient management of natural resource revenues in capital-scarce developing economies. We depart from usual prescriptions based on the permanent income hypothesis, since for capital-scarce countries it is preferable to invest domestically. Since revenue streams are...

A windfall of foreign aid or natural resource revenue faces government with choices of how to manage public borrowing, public asset accumulation, and the distribution of funds to households (across time and household types), particularly when the windfall is both anticipated and temporary. These...

This paper explores the choices faced by developing country governments that have received substantial revenues from natural resources. The economic principles underlying the choices between consumption, domestic investment, and the accumulation of foreign assets are analysed. The priority...

This paper investigates the scope for international rules to address market failures in trade in natural resources and the associated international transactions of prospecting and investment in resource exploitation. We argue that several market failures are likely to have substantial costs....