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Natural Resource Of Natural Resources

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While natural resources have played an important role in creating wealth and powering development, recent research shows an inverse correlation between the abundance of natural resources and growth and development. This has been true of many of the economies in Latin America, Africa and the Arab world, regions characterized by high levels of natural resources endowments, be they minerals, oil or timber. The inverse correlation between endowment and wealth creation—dubbed as the natural resource curse hypothesis—has been the subject of intense study and has yielded valuable insights into political economy issues.

Natural resource abundance has been associated with predatory political regimes which win and maintain political support …show more content…

This understanding is noticeably sparse. To be fair, developing a good understanding of stakeholder motivations is extremely challenging because of the complex nature of the sector, which itself arises from special sector characteristics. What are these? These range from the biophysical, to the social, to economic, to the state. On the biophysical side, forest resources contribute multiple benefits and services; yet the resource (even though it is technically renewable) renews only quite slowly and many services can be irreversibly lost if the resource stock falls below a critical minimum. On the social front, this is a sector which is characterized by unclear ownership and access rights and conflicts between traditional and “modern” legal rights. The resource generates multiple benefits for multiple users and often these are in conflict. Unlike other resources, forests provide a wide range of public benefits ( watershed protection, carbon sequestration, biodiversity protection, and ecosystem resilience) only when they are preserved; and they provide private benefits (timber rents) principally when they are harvested. So there is a well-recognized need for high levels of intervention to ensure optimal and sustainable levels of harvesting as well as adequate protection of the public benefits. In addition, both,

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