Has Botswana Beaten the Resource Curse?

Abstract

Botswana is frequently lauded in the academic literature. The country has been described as a success story (Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2001), an African miracle (Samatar 1999) and ‘the exemplary post colony’ (Werbner 2004: 2). Botswana’s success is particularly noteworthy in the context of the ‘resource curse’ literature that highlights the negative economic and political effects that large concentrations of mineral wealth tend to produce in poor countries.2 While a number of valuable studies have highlighted Botswana’s success in managing its resource wealth wisely,3 none have explicitly juxtaposed Botswana’s performance against the empirical findings from across the breadth of the resource curse literature. This study contributes to the larger literature on Botswana and on mineral wealth and development more generally by critically evaluating the country’s experience across five dimensions frequently highlighted in the resource curse literature common to resource-rich countries: (i) the tendency not to invest in education, (ii) increased risks for civil war, (iii) susceptibility to the Dutch disease and slow or negative economic growth, (iv) failure to establish or consolidate democracy, and (v) the corrosive effects that resource wealth has on the quality of institutions.

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