Saudi Arabia is hardly a desirable model, though enough money admittedly papers over a lot of human rights abuses. In the above example it's like a hot girl with severe mental health issues.
Norway's sovereign wealth fund is a strategy to escape the resource curse. It's like a hot girl with high self esteem and a handgun in her purse.
Alaska is one state in a country that has other things going for it. It's like a hot girl with a protective older brother.
Less discussed than Alaska, Texas uses it's oil money per its constitution to fund its university which seems pretty shrewd mitigation to the resource curse at a high level. Also no income tax for its citizens.
If Alaska would be a separate state maybe there would be a reason for concern /s
I think 'resource curse' got it a bit backward although effect is straightforward and obvious - it allows a-holes aka bottom of society to rise, gives them extra booster rockets to rise fast (ie capture diamond mine, or oil fields like ISIL and sell via Turkey which was their primary income).
Norway got it right because well its Norway, similar would happen if it was found ie in Switzerland. Some basic human decency ingrained deep in population and thus also in politics and those who set things up for future. If that's not present and society is more everybody-for-themselves, then yes it becomes the curse and more burden than benefit.
This is not the resource curse. It's basic economics actually: when there is a natural resource to be exploited, most investment, human capital and attention goes to that resource. This is because that's where the biggest returns are. Furthermore, the country's currency will get very strong, so it will make exporting anything else very difficult.
Combine these factors and you end up with a country trapped in producing mainly only that one natural resource.
This is also why Saudi Arabia is building seemingly insane megaprojects: to lure in enough production and construction to kick start a on industry unrelated to oil.
Alaska doesn't count because it was part of the US, which was already a developed (for the time) economy.
Saudi Arabia, Norway and a few Gulf min-states (Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain) are the rare counterexamples that kind of prove the rule. There's a great FT article[1] about the Iraqi man who helped lead Norway's oil revolution in the proper direction, and it was really not obvious. Why Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain managed to use their resources successfully (of course to an extent a matter of debate, human rights being a big problem in most of those places) and other dictatorships failed, even in similar scenarios (same religion, royals) is a tough one to answer.
norway is the only example of someone who broke the curse.
Saudi, gulf monarchies and all other examples that you can come up with(except maybe russia, but it's a very big and not that simple to analyze), either already fucked by the curse, or still in the process(which is pleasant enough, so most people think it's ok), the metric is that other parts of the economy have meaningless growth rate compared to resources extraction, at best. Sometimes it's negative. Add growth of corruption and inequality to that as well.
Their economy is pretty much exclusively oil-based, very few other industries.
If you run the numbers their fund will fund current expenses for only a decade or so if oil stopped completely. Which isn't really enough time to start other industries for their citizens to have jobs.
So they're basically completely dependent on oil, with maybe a short runway for afterwards. They did not break the curse.
you argue that the curse is to have majority of your economy oil/resource extraction related businesses.
But my point is that the curse is that there is a stimulus to stop doing any other businesses. And it seems that Norway has largely avoided that by forcing as much oil money as possible out of the economy(oil fund)
Pretty cool examples bro, Saudi Arabia had a bloody history, where the brits helped the current monarchy take over in the 18th century. The US has 5 military bases there btw. One might consider that a (now) peaceful occupation.
I didn't know Alaska was a country.
I don't really know much about Norway's petrolium history, but I can't say I'm surprised that they weren't invaded for their oil, which is in the sea to begin with.
examples include Saudi Arabia, Norway and Alaska. Oh no wait bad examples.