Academic Article

Guidelines for exploiting natural resource wealth

The principles of how best to manage the various components of national wealth are outlined, where the permanent income hypothesis, the Hotelling rule, and the Hartwick rule play a prominent role. As far as managing natural resource wealth is concerned, a case is made to use an intergenerational sovereign wealth fund to smooth consumption across generations, a liquidity fund for the precautionary buffers to deal with commodity price volatility, and an investment fund to park part of the windfall until the country is ready to absorb extra spending on domestic investment. Capital scarcity implies that a positive part of the windfall should be spent on domestic investment. The conclusions highlight the political economy problems that will have to be tackled with these normative proposals for managing wealth.

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Academic Article

Wealth and sustainability

For economists in 1974, it was a live question whether the exhaustion of natural resources, such as oil, would necessarily lead to the decline of economic activity. Solow showed that constant levels of consumption could be sustained in the face of exhaustibility if there is sufficient substitutability between produced and natural factors of production. Hartwick then proved that underpinning this result is a saving rule—set investment in produced capital equal to the value of resource depletion at each point in time. A large literature has shown that a comprehensive measure of the change in real wealth—net saving—plays a central role in determining whether current well-being can be sustained. In particular, current declines in real wealth signal that future well-being will also decline, a result that has been confirmed empirically using data for developing countries. Changes in wealth and sustain- ability are therefore joined at the hip. The current composition of wealth serves to define the policy challenges that countries face in achieving sustainable development. If substitution possibilities are limited between natural and other factors of production, as one might expect, then technical progress is a necessary complement to policies for sustainability.

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