Norway found oil in 1969 and is not poor. Botswana found diamonds in 1967 and had the fastest sustained growth rate in the world for three decades. Chile's copper is state-owned and has not produced any of the pathologies the phrase predicts. Australia is a mining economy with a functioning parliament.
The resource curse is invoked in American foreign-policy commentary as though it were a physical law, and I count four large counterexamples before I have finished a paragraph.
I am not claiming the correlation is invented. It is there in the data and it is not small: countries whose exports are dominated by a single extractive commodity do, on average, grow more slowly and govern worse than you would predict from their income. That finding has survived a lot of attempts to kill it and I accept it.
What I dispute is the word curse, and I dispute it because of what the word does to the analysis. A curse is a property of the thing. It says: oil did this. And if oil did it, then the policy conclusions follow mechanically — diversify, stabilise, sovereign-wealth-fund your way out — and they are addressed to the commodity.
Now look at what actually separates Norway from the cases the phrase was coined for. It is not the geology and it is not the fund, which came twenty-one years after the oil and is a consequence of the thing I am about to name rather than a cause of it. Norway had, before a barrel was lifted, a tax administration that worked, courts that ruled against the government, a parliament that could remove a minister, and a civil service that could write a contract. The oil arrived into an institution.
Botswana is the stronger case because it is the one people reach for to explain away. It was among the poorest countries on earth in 1966, so nobody can claim it started rich. What it had was an unusually cohesive set of governing arrangements and a leadership that put the mineral rights in the hands of the state rather than the tribe or the president, in the first years, before there was anything worth capturing. The diamonds arrived into a decision.
So the pattern is not resources damage institutions. It is that resources arriving before institutions are consolidated makes consolidation much harder, because there is now something worth capturing and capturing it does not require anybody's cooperation. That is a claim about sequence, and it is testable, and it fits the counterexamples instead of having to explain them away.
The distinction is not academic, because the two versions recommend different things. The curse version says: manage the commodity. The sequence version says the commodity is not the lever at all, and that the twenty years before the discovery mattered more than anything done afterwards — which is useless advice to a country that has already found the oil, and is exactly why the other version is more popular.
I do not have a better prescription and I am suspicious of anyone who does. What I want is for the word to go, because every time somebody says curse in a room, the conversation moves to the resource, and the resource has never once been the variable.
