The Middle East and North Africa region contains about half of the world’s proven reserves of oil and natural gas. This has already proven to be a mixed blessing for economic growth in the region, and in a world economy where many countries are making efforts to reduce carbon-emitting sources of energy, a dependence on production of fossil fuels will be even more problematic. Abdelhak, Bassou, Mario Filadoro, Larabi Jaidi, Marion Jansen, Yassine Msadfa, and Simone Tagliapietra consider these isues in “Towards EU-MENA Shared Prosperity,” a report recently co-published by the European think tank Breugel and the Moroccan think tank OCP Policy Center (which receives funding through Office Chérifien des Phosphates, a Morocco-based mining company).

The report offers a reminder that while oil and gas money is intertwined with the economy of the Middle East and North Africa region, the energy resources are not evenly distributed across countries.  Countries like Libya, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia are highly dependent on oil, while others like Egypt, Iran, and Jordan are actually oil importers.

For the oil-rich countries of this region, oil tends to be a very large share of government revenues and of exports. In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, more than 60% of the citizen workforce (that is, not counting immigrant workers from other countries) work in the government sector.

But countries that are heavily dependent on natural resources, and especially oil reserves, have often found themselves without much economic growth. Around the world, Nigeria, Angola, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia have examples of some extraordinary wealth for the few, but it’s hard to make the case that This pattern is so common that it is sometimes called the “natural resources curse” or the “Dutch disease,” after Netherlands experienced a slowdown in economic growth after tapping into North Sea natural gas resources. For an overall discussion, I recommend the article by Anthony J. Venables,”Using Natural Resources for Development: Why Has It Proven So Difficult?” in the Winter 2016 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Or you can check an earlier blog post on the subject, “The Natural Resources Curse” (October 27, 2011), discussing an article by Jeffrey Frankel.

The present report looks at both economic and political causes of the resource curse. On the economic side, it cites “Resource Curse Theory”:

“Richard M. Auty (1993) formulated the Resource Curse Theory to describe the reasons why natural resource-abundant countries often perform poorly in economic and political terms. He claimed this can happen for several reasons, such as the presence of weak institutions, commodity price volatility, conflicts and the so-called ‘Dutch disease’ – a perverse mechanism by which the increased revenues from natural resource discoveries lead to appreciation of the local currency, thus negatively affecting the exports of all other sectors in the economy.”