How to manage your natural resources
admin September 24th, 2009
The London School of Economics runs a fantastic public lecture series all through the year, many of which are concerned with development issues and climate change.
This week it is running a series under the heading International Growth Centre Growth Week, and on Tuesday Advance Aid attended a session on Natural Resource Management, which featured a presentation by Paul Collier, professor of economics at Oxford University and co-director of the International Growth Centre.
You may well have read one or more of his books – The Bottom Billion or Wars, Guns and Votes – and if you haven’t, they come strongly recommended. Also recommended is listening to the podcast of his elegantly constructed, accessible and highly informative lecture. It is available here if you scroll down to the September 2009 listings.
Summarising in a few sentences what Professor Collier had to say in 45 minutes is an impossible task, but the gist of his presentation was that natural resource management was too important to African countries to be left to the market and it needed strong and consistent state intervention on a number of levels if the ‘rent’ on these assets was to be shared fairly between society and the exploiters of the assets.
He then went on to outline what those interventions should be and described the pitfalls that await the unwary.
By listening to this you will, according to him, be doing the same as the President of Sierra Leone, his full cabinet and his top 60 administrators. It’s good to hear that they were paying attention when, following the recent discovery of oil to add to their diamonds, they had been told by the professor that they now had the opportunity to “be Angola”. And he did not mean this as a compliment.
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