The Financial Times quotes CGD vice-president Todd Moss on Nigeria's oil resource.
From the article:
"That puts them at the frontier of new ideas for solving the problems that oil brings. “Countries who have managed natural resources well are those with powerful constituencies that can stop the government from feeding at the trough [of oil money],” says Todd Moss from the Washington-based Center for Global Development and an advocate of cash distributions. He favours Alaska-style payouts, which he says “are a way to manufacture such a constituency”.
Where civil society or non-resource business is weak, Mr Moss points out, natural resources do not put a country on a fast track to development. “Look at Nigeria – $300bn [in oil revenues] over the past three decades, but the average Nigerian has got poorer.”"
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