Monday, November 5, 2007

Why Africa won't be the new Norway

Catchy headline, huh?
It's from the Private Sector Development blog at the World Bank. The PSD blog has this on their sidebar:

Most popular last month

Best targets for bribe-seekers

Here's the Afro-Nordic fusion delusion post:

Norway, the world's third largest oil exporter, passively invests a large portion of proceeds into a national pension fund. "The future-generations fund," which is now worth $300 billion, invests into foreign assets only as a way to remove the temptation for politicians to spend money on pork-barrel projects. Can oil-rich African countries follow the Scandinavian path or are they destined to suffer under the resource course?

John Ghazvinian, the author of "Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil," is pessimistic: "Between 1970 and 1993, countries without oil saw their economies grow four times faster than those of countries with oil."