Rick van der Ploeg

Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford



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.

Full paper

Video

Panel on Intangible Wealth

What is intangible wealth and what is its relation to TFP and future consumption? The panel discusses how to calculate residual capital, and what its relationship to tangible capital and economic growth is.