LAUSR

More than twenty-five years have passed since Richard M. Auty famously proposed his hypothesis about what is currently known as the Resource Curse, which, at that time, mainly focused on the lack of growth and development in resource-rich countries. Since then, this phenomenon has evolved but kept its features as a syndrome, meaning, a group of symptoms whose causes (or even the existence of a real curse) have not been elucidated yet. This has not been an obstacle for the Resource Curse to become a vibrant, and sometimes polemic, controversy around the development opportunities of resource-rich countries. During the first and second decades of this century, the so-called commodity supercycle brought large windfall gains to resource-rich countries, but sustainable development outcomes are far from promising. As a result, the Resource Curse has come back to the fore, and we find an increasing number of recent articles and books published on the role of natural resources in promoting (or impeding) sustainable growth and development. In The Rent Curse: Natural Resources, Policy Choice, and Economic Development, Auty and Hadyn I. Furlonge review and enrich this debate by conceptualizing the Resource Curse as a potential outcome of a broader and more complex theory of the Rent Curse. Based on the rent cycling theory that analyzes “the interaction between the rent (its scale, volatility and concentration), and elite incentives, structural change, social capital accumulation, and political maturation” (pp. 25–26), the authors propose two development trajectories: the low-rent competitive diversification model, where elites are motivated to be efficient and foster national growth and development due to the scarcity of rents; and the high rent staple trap model, where these high rents cause different forms of rent-seeking behavior, which may threaten long-term economic growth and—ultimately—lead to the well-known Resource Curse. Both stylized models are plausible nondeterministic ideal types through which to compare more complex real cases. This is what the authors do in section 2, testing their theory through a comparative study between two countries—Trinidad and Tobago and Mauritius. These case studies shared very similar characteristics until their independence after World War II but, since then, have followed divergent paths of development: the first one, as a clear-cut illustration of the staple trap model in high-rent countries; and the second one, as a case of the low-rent competitive diversification model. This section of the book is an exemplary and attractive application of comparative research by using the theory proposed by the authors. In section 3, the analysis is broadly extended to various countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia; and the results are less convincing, perhaps due to the lack of a more detailed analysis and excessive generalizations related to economic development strategies. From a methodological perspective, the book is an answer to the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated monocausal econometric studies of the Resource Curse that, to some extent, neglect Auty’s original contribution. The authors make a welcome call to scholars to avoid silver bullet explanations and confront the complexity of the Resource Curse, acknowledging not only economic-related factors but also institutional and political ones. This objective leads to the proposal of mixed approaches combining statistical analysis with historically grounded multidisciplinary approaches. In this BO O K R EV EW