Property Rights and the Resource Curse

Conceptualizing the curse: two views on our responsibility for the ‘resource curse’

“…Wenar is surely right when emphasizing that 'The priority in reforming global commerce is not to replace ''free trade'' with ''fair trade,'' but rather ''to create trade where now there is theft.''' 46 Yet this distinction corroborates the inward looking focus even more than the outward looking view on better outcomes. One has a duty to end one's material involvement in theft independently of outcomes: one's duty not to take part in a crime does not, after all, depend on the victim's identity, on the severity of the victim's condition following the crime, or on whether the crime will go on even without one's participation.…”

“…28 Wenar takes a similar line, both in his reading of Pogge and in his own position. While agreeing that 'the resource privilege, as Pogge says, is both suspect in principle and pernicious in its consequences,' 29 Wenar takes the consequences rather than the principle (that theft is inherently wrong) to be the grounding motivation, emphasizing that 'those who feel the awful toll of poverty, and understand the malleability of institutions [as opposed to seeing them as an incontrollable ''curse''], will look for ways to make global institutions better for the poor...' 30 For Wenar the most dominant feature of the resource curse is the fact that 'many countries rich with natural resources are full of very poor people,' 31 and the key goal of the 'realistic reform of international trade in resources' he proposes is to change their condition, specifically 'to change global institutions so as to reduce repression and severe poverty.' 32 Pogge summarizes their shared motivation in the following, distinctly outward-looking manner:…”

A Review on the Resource Curse

“…(Kolstad and Wiig, 2009b) This effect may break down all internal efforts and puts the problem on the international level. Wenar (2008) argues that commodity export revenues are simply stolen from the citizens of resource abundant countries by their tyrants. Hence, multinational corporations are dealing with stolen products and this activity needs to be restricted.…”

Fiscal Policy and Natural Resource Entitlements

“…Resource extraction and processing is a complicated business involving large quantities of physical capital, human capital, and technology, whether employed by national 1 Wenar (2007). public companies, or by international private companies.…”