Mining for Change: Natural Resources and Industry in Africa

John Page · Finn Tarp

Feb 2020 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

For a growing number of countries in Africa the discovery and exploitation of natural resources is a great opportunity, but one accompanied by considerable risks. Countries dependent on oil, gas, and mining have tended to have weaker long-run growth, higher rates of poverty, and greater income inequality than less resource-abundant economies. For these resource producing economies relative prices make it more difficult to diversify into activities outside of the resource sector, limiting structural change. Mining for Change: Natural Resources and Industry in Africa presents research undertaken to understand how better management of the revenues and opportunities associated with natural resources can accelerate diversification and structural change in Africa. It begins with essays on managing the boom, the construction sector, and linking industry to the major issues that frame the question of how to use natural resources for structural change. It reports the main research results for five countries-Ghana, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia. Each country study covers managing the boom, the construction sector, and linking industry to the resource. Mining for Change argues that good policy can make a difference and sets out ideas for policy change and widening the options for structural change. . An open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence.

About the author

John Page is a Senior Fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution and a Non-resident Senior Fellow of the UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER). He is also visiting professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo, Japan and a Research Associate of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University. From 1980 to 2008 he was at the World Bank where his senior positions included: Director, Poverty Reduction, Director, Economic Policy, and Chief Economist, Africa. He is the author of several books and more than 100 published papers on economic development. Finn Tarp is Professor at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) and Coordinator of the UCPH Development Economics Research Group (DERG). Director of UNU-WIDER from 2009 to 2018, and now a Non-Resident Senior Fellow of UNU-WIDER. Professor Tarp is a leading international expert on development strategy and foreign aid, with an interest in poverty, income distribution and growth, micro- and macroeconomic policy and modelling, agricultural sector policy and planning, household/enterprise development, and economic adjustment and reform as well as climate change, sustainability, and natural resources. He has published widely in leading economics and development journals and books by international academic publishers.