I’m Afraid You Have Oil
And It’s a Diagnosis No Poor Country Should Want
What makes oil-producing countries different from other countries–and why would something as ostensibly beneficial as oil wealth be bad? It’s not a coincidence that a lot of oil lies beneath the ground of the world’s more volatile countries, said UCLA political scientist Michael Ross, author of The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations. And neither Western intervention nor multinational corporations are to blame.
Rather, Ross told a crowd at the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, oil is bad for developing countries because of “the extraordinary power and the kinds …
