Natural Resources

More from the Series

Blog Post
Guyana’s Oil Boom: 2 Steps Down, 4 to Go
March 27, 2019
ExxonMobil announced the discovery of two more massive oil fields off the coast of Guyana last month. If back-of-the-envelope estimates of around $5 billion of oil revenue per year are correct, that equates to around $6,410 USD per person—far more than the current GDP per c...
Blog Post
How Can Countries Escape the Natural Resource Curse? Answer: Democracy
February 07, 2019
How can countries escape the natural resource curse? And to what extent do cohesive and democratic institutions facilitate this process? In a new CGD working paper, we look at Nigeria—often seen as the prime example of a country cursed by its wealth. We show that when political institutio...
WORKING PAPERS
Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence - Working Paper 503
February 07, 2019
Can institutionalized transfers of resource rents be a source of civil conflict? Are cohesive institutions better at managing conflicts over distribution? We exploit exogenous variation in revenue disbursements to local governments and use new data on local democratic institutions in Nigeria to answ...
POLICY PAPERS
What Mining Can Learn from Oil: A Study of Special Transfer Pricing Practices in the Oil Sector, and their Potential Application to Hard Rock Minerals
July 16, 2018
Governments of mining countries are vulnerable to investors manipulating transfer prices as a means of avoiding paying taxes. This paper looks at whether special practices in the oil sector that provide materially greater protection against transfer pricing risk could be applied to hard rock mineral...
Blog Post
US Backs Away from Its Commitment to Extractive Industry Transparency
November 07, 2017
The US Department of the Interior announced last week that the United States would no longer seek to comply with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an international multi-stakeholder organization that aims to increase revenue transparency and accountability in natura...
Blog Post
Stop Spreading the Myth: Zambia Is Not Losing $3 Billion to Tax Avoidance
Maya Forstater
October 23, 2017
If transparency in debates around matters of natural resource wealth, then so too does the way that figures get translated into public debates.  Earlier this month the Lusaka Times published a claim that multinational mining companies were “robbing Zambia of an estimated $3...