Resources Matter

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The extraction and use of natural resources underpins a global economy that provides high living standards for many as well as the prospect of ending poverty in the developing world. Mining as well as the oil and gas industry - which constitute the ’extractive industries’ - are vitally important sectors in many developing countries. They provide substantial public revenues as well as much-needed foreign exchange, and livelihoods for many. Yet, the extractives industries are highly controversial. The continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels in energy generation and transport, together with the emissions associated with mining and metals refining, has taken the world to levels of emissions that increasingly imperil humanity. In addition, the extractive industries have a poor record of damaging nature both through pollution as well as via the destruction of biodiversity (thereby endangering the livelihoods that depend on such renewable natural capital). This book explores a central issue of our time: our materials world is simultaneously both part of the problem (especially fossil fuels) as well as part of its solution (the materials necessary for the technologies required for ’net zero’).

Resources Matter discusses how the extractive industries can be leveraged to generate larger and more beneficial impacts in poorer economies and improve livelihoods at local and national levels. A central argument is that the so-called ’resource curse’ - the potentially negative effect of resource booms on economies and societies - is not inevitable, as it is often said to be. Rather, much can be done through policy, coordinated government action in partnership with the private sector, and judicious investments to improve the prospects for resource wealth to make a positive contribution to escaping underdevelopment and poverty. Companies in the extractives industry have a key role in working with governments to achieve these goals.

Tony Addison, University of Copenhagen, Alan Roe, University of Warwick

Tony Addison is a Professor of Economics at the University of Copenhagen Development Economics Research Group (DERG), and formerly Chief Economist and Deputy Director of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) in Helsinki. He was previously a Professor at Manchester University, and lecturer at the University of Warwick and SOAS, London University. He has 40 years of experience in the field of development economics. He has undertaken many advisory assignments for governments, and for ILO, IMF, UNICEF, and the World Bank. He began his career in Tanzania’s Ministry of Trade and Industry.

Alan Roe is Honorary Professorial Fellow at University of Warwick. Early in his career he was a research economist at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, at the University of Cambridge (Economic Growth Project) and a Visiting Professor of Economics at Washington University in the USA. He then taught economics for many years at the University of Warwick where he was also for a period the Chairman of Department. In 1994 he was appointed Principal Economist at the World Bank where he worked on the challenges of reform in the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, and Armenia. After leaving the Bank in 2000, he returned part-time to the University of Warwick where he is now, in retirement, an Honorary Professorial Fellow but also joined Oxford Policy Management (OPM) as Principal Economist and Board Director. He initiated OPM’s involvement in the economics of mining and other natural resources issues. He has written extensively in books, academic journals, and for other outle