Tackling The Resource Curse and The Role of Sustainable Development In Petroleum Resource

(Comparative Case Study Of The UK, USA, and Nigeria).

Project description
The endowment of natural resources can threaten a nations long lasting affluence. This is due to the

fact that nations who are natural resources intensive ironically develop slower than economies, which

are less natural resources-intensive. Oil, gas and other minerals may give a negative impact

development as measured by income per capita. Issues such as this does not usually say much about

sustainability, which is very important for developing countries such as Nigeria whose economic growth

and welfare derives primarily from the exploitation of exhaustible resource.
Stemming from the above, the author believes that states with abundant sub-soil assets in the form of

oil, gas and minerals are in a position to induce enormous revenues from extraction that can in turn spur

economic development. This means that resource abundance should be a blessing. However, this is not

the case in some countries, which are blessed with these resources; such as Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea,

Libya, and Egypt etc.
This project will look at the variables that help to explain different outcomes of extraction in terms of

sustainable development. The literature will focus on the impact of resource richness on economic

growth and income per capita. While this is an essential metric for economic development, it does not

say much about sustainability, which is crucial in the case of exhaustible resources like oil and minerals

whose production is bound to peak and cease at some point in time. It will draw on environmental

accounting and take adjusted net savings as an indicator of weak sustainability. Consistent with the

resource-curse literature, the project will consider series of governance and institutional indicators to

assess the interconnection between the extractions of resources, governance and development

outcomes.
The objective of the work is to enhance the understanding of the interactions between resource

dependence, institutions and the quality of governance, armed violence and sustainable development in

resource-rich developing countries. This project will also examine the implication of petroleum

exploitation for the possibility of sustainable development in Nigeria. There would be a comparative

case study of other countries affluent in Natural Resources such as the Saudi Arabia and the USA and

how they manage to avoid the resource curse and also a discussion on why the United Kingdom which is

less affluent in Oil, Gas and Mineral (compare to other developing countries in this case Nigeria) still

manage to gain more than these countries more blessed with these natural resources