Abstract: Political leaders and economists have for decades been puzzled by the paradox of Africa’s unequivocal potential for economic boom and its enigmatic slow economy and high levels of impoverishment. Despites sub-Saharan African countries’ abundant resource endowment, the economy of most of these resource wealth countries have performed abysmally. Focusing on possible trade effects that are injurious to growth such as exogenous shocks over the economy and ad hoc policies as "increased efficiency policies" some economists and political economists have argued that such actions have actually reduced the country's real income. Scholars such as Bhagwati, Johnson and Dinopoulos contend that external shocks and low policies could have dire effects on growth. However, in the case of Africa, besides the aforementioned factors, many other deep-seated factors could be identified as being potential recipes for “immiserizing growth” on the continent. besides the ‘resource curse’ factor, lack of proper economic growth structural shift and low human capacity, other factors such as regime survival, type of governance, log rolling/elitism, historical antecedents (including colonialism, and engraved agrarian economy), bad policies and conflict (resulting from exploitation of natural resources) can equally be attributable (disruptive) factors. Nevertheless, the phenomenon has not adequately been analysed in terms of the paradox of Africa’s poor social and economic welfare amidst vast accumulation of natural resources as being parallel to “immiserizing growth.” This article therefore explores the “resource abundance” and its escorting effects in the sub-Saharan African sub-region as potentially analogous to the well-known phenomenon of “immiserizing growth” in economic circles. It further makes recommendations to policy makers on ways to curb the situation.
Keywords: resource curse, immiserizing growth/wealth, Dutch Disease, elitist theory, conflict.
Title: The Paradox of Resource Abundance: Unexplored Patterns of Immiserizing Growth in Africa
Author: Isaac Nunoo
International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research and Innovations
ISSN 2348-1218 (print), ISSN 2348-1226 (online)
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