Natural resources and economic (under)development in Africa
Unless domestic elite property rights substantially improve, the natural resource sector will not power Africa's economic takeoff
I: Why aren’t there more African resource sector billionaires?
For a continent allegedly full of natural resources, African economies have created very little in legible productive wealth from the resource sector.1 For example, in 2019 alone the continent produced $406b in mineral exports. Yet despite such eye-popping annual flows, the confluence of personalist politics, weak institutions, and possibilities of elite collusion in the natural resource sector has not produced many regional commodity billionaires.
For the ambitious and well-connected, what could be easier than accumulating wealth by hiring people to dig stuff from the ground and ship it abroad?
As it turns out, it is not easy become a legible resource billionaire in Africa. Not even when you are a lifetime personalist president of a resource-dependent state — like Ali Bongo Ondimba, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, or Denis Sassou Nguesso. These men and their families may yet be billionaires, but the fact that they have to hid…