Under a 1962 water agreement, Singapore purchases raw water from the Malaysian state of Johor at three Malaysian sen per thousand gallons, treats it, and returns a portion to Johor at fifty sen per thousand gallons. The price was fixed when Singapore was a self-governing British colony and Johor already belonged to the Federation of Malaya, independent since 1957. It has been a recurring source of diplomatic friction ever since. The agreement expires in 2061. Either side could ask for a price review in 1987; Malaysia did not, and the political possibility of revision has never disappeared entirely. Singapore has spent decades and billions of dollars on desalination plants, water recycling infrastructure, and domestic reservoir expansion so that its supply no longer hangs on a treaty a neighbour keeps contesting and that in any case runs out in 2061; national water self-sufficiency is a declared strategic objective. The institutional seriousness a government brings to the price of water per thousand gallons is a reasonable index of its existential vulnerability.
Singapore’s per-capita GDP in 2025, measured at purchasing power parity, was approximately USD 163,000, more than 80 percent above that of the United States. The country has no mineral deposits worth naming, no oil, less than one percent of its territory under arable land, and has long depended on a neighbour for a large share of its water under a treaty it does not fully control. It is, on any intuitive ledger of natural endowment, broke.
Nigeria, by contrast, holds some of the world’s largest proven oil reserves: approximately 37.5 billion barrels in 2024, the second-largest in Africa after Libya and roughly the tenth- or eleventh-largest in the world. It has substantial natural gas reserves, significant agricultural land, and a population large enough to constitute a major domestic market. Per-capita GDP in 2025 was approximately USD 1,200 in current US dollars, or about USD 9,500 at purchasing power parity.
The gap between these two countries, roughly seventeenfold at purchasing power parity and about eightyfold in current dollars, is not adequately explained by pointing to corruption, or instability, or poor leadership, or bad policy. Those explanations are accurate at the level of description but only relocate the question: why did corruption and instability persist in Nigeria over decades of oil wealth, and why did Singapore build functional institutions instead? The standard answer of wise leadership and good policy names the phenomenon it was supposed to explain. Lee Kuan Yew made good decisions; Nigerian governments made bad ones. But that observation demands its own explanation, and the explanation is structural.
The resource-endowment theory of national wealth is among the most intuitive ideas in development economics. Countries with valuable natural assets should be better positioned to develop than countries without them. That intuition has shaped policies and donor frameworks for generations. And yet the evidence, examined systematically, often reverses the relationship, with enough consistency across enough countries that the reversal itself needs explaining. If resources reliably led to wealth, Singapore and Nigeria would have swapped positions.
The Wrong Theory
The intuition that natural endowments produce economic development has a recognisable logic: a country with oil has something to sell; revenue from that sale can fund roads, schools, hospitals; roads, schools, and hospitals raise productivity. Post-war development economics formalised it into what became known as the “big push” tradition — the idea, associated with Paul Rosenstein-Rodan’s 1943 argument, that developing economies needed large, coordinated investment programmes, financed in his proposal largely by international lending, to break out of low-level equilibria.
For resource-rich countries, commodity export earnings looked like a ready-made source of that capital. What the theory missed was which way the feedback would run over time.
In 1995, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner measured the relationship between natural resource abundance and economic growth across a large sample of countries from 1971 to 1989. Using natural resource exports as a share of GDP in 1971 as their measure of endowment, they found a strong and statistically significant negative correlation: the more resource-abundant a country was at the start of the period, the slower it grew. The finding was neither marginal nor fragile, and it survived numerous controls. The “resource curse”, a phrase Richard Auty had popularised two years earlier, now had a cross-country measurement.
The finding has since been replicated, contested, and refined. Some have disputed the time period, the sample, or the causal interpretation; others, the measure itself. The scholarly position now is roughly this: the resource curse is real but context-dependent; the most widely held explanation runs through institutions; and whether a resource-rich country develops or stagnates depends substantially on the quality of governance at the point resource wealth arrives. Resource wealth creates a structural pressure that not all institutional environments can absorb.
None of the countries in question has literally zero natural resources. Switzerland has substantial hydroelectric capacity. The Netherlands had the Groningen gas field. Luxembourg built its early wealth partly on iron ore deposits. The threshold that matters is fiscal: can a state finance itself primarily through resource rents in ways that remove the fiscal pressure to tax, build administrative capacity, and maintain accountability? Switzerland’s hydropower is a domestic energy input. It does not generate the kind of export rent that, at scale, allows a government to avoid taxing its population. The Netherlands’ gas field did generate that kind of rent, but for a state whose institutional foundations predate the discovery. Luxembourg’s iron ore was significant but never large enough relative to the overall economy to constitute the fiscal model.
The Sachs-Warner debate
The 1995 Sachs-Warner paper remains one of the most cited pieces in development economics, but its robustness has been questioned from several directions. Christa Brunnschweiler and Erwin Bulte argued that resource exports as a share of GDP measure dependence rather than abundance, so that exporting a lot of resources may show that a country lacks alternatives rather than that it is well endowed, and that dependence is often a result of failed development in other sectors. When resource wealth is measured as estimated resource stocks rather than export intensity, the negative relationship disappears: in their regressions, resource abundance is associated with faster growth and better institutions, while resource dependence has no measurable effect on growth. The 1971–1989 time window also captures particular episodes, such as oil shocks and debt crises, that may not generalise. The current scholarly position accepts that resource wealth creates institutional risks without accepting the original causal specification as fully established, and holds that the curse is mediated by institutions and that context determines the outcome.The Governance Trap
A government that can finance itself through commodity rents does not need to tax its population. A government that does not tax its population has structurally weaker incentives to build the administrative, legal, and regulatory infrastructure through which taxation becomes legitimate and compliance becomes rational. The institutional erosion follows logically from a particular fiscal arrangement, and no bad choice or moral failing is needed to explain it.
Hazem Beblawi set out four structural characteristics of a rentier state: rent situations predominate in the economy; the economy relies on substantial external rent and so does not need a strong domestic productive sector; only a small fraction of the population is involved in generating the rent, while most are engaged in distributing or using it; and the government is the principal recipient of that external rent. What follows from this configuration is a political compact of a specific kind. The state distributes rather than extracts; citizens receive rather than pay; the accountability relationship that taxation requires (you pay, I perform, and if I do not perform you withhold) is replaced by a distributional relationship in which the state provides benefits in exchange for political compliance. The compact is structurally rational for both sides, and it follows predictably from the fiscal model.
Nigeria shows the structural logic at work. From the oil boom of the mid-1970s until the price collapse of 2014, petroleum typically supplied between roughly 60 and 80 percent of federally collected revenue, and more than 80 percent in peak years. Between 2015 and 2022 its share fell to between about 44 and 63 percent, as prices and output declined. On international governance indicators, from control of corruption to political stability, Nigeria has sat in the bottom quartiles on most measures across most years for which data are available. Oil revenues flowed to a state that, over time, organised itself around distributing them rather than earning them from a taxed population. That fiscal arrangement entrenched institutional weakness, which deepened over decades into the default mode of political economy. Once that feedback was running, reform was structurally difficult even when individual leaders attempted it. The fiscal logic applies with equal force to any state arranged on comparable terms.
Venezuela is a parallel case: a country that was among the wealthiest in Latin America in the mid-twentieth century, sustained by oil revenues, experienced a collapse in institutional quality and living standards as the rentier fiscal model entrenched itself and became the only model on offer.
None of this is deterministic. Norway discovered oil in 1969, has maintained some of the highest governance scores in the world, and has put the proceeds into the Government Pension Fund Global. Norway is the canonical exception; Botswana, which turned diamond revenues into four decades of rapid growth, is the best-known developing-country one. But Norway is an exception because it had developed institutions before the oil arrived. Those institutions grew out of the fiscal sociology of a tax state with strong labour organisation, parliamentary accountability, and social democratic governance structures that predated the resource wealth by generations. The oil fund’s design was itself a product of those prior institutions. Norway is evidence that institutional quality at the time of discovery mediates outcomes, and that this mediation requires active, sustained institutional effort even in the most favourable conditions.
Norway: exception or template?
Norway's success in managing oil wealth rests on a specific historical sequence: strong institutions built before the oil was discovered, an existing Scandinavian social democratic state with established fiscal accountability, and deliberate institutional design of the oil fund after 1990. The Government Pension Fund Global, worth about USD 2.3 trillion in mid-2026 and widely regarded as the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, was explicitly designed to insulate domestic fiscal policy from oil price volatility: revenues go into the fund, and the government is to spend, over time, only the fund's expected real return. The fund invests only abroad, which helps contain Dutch Disease effects on the domestic economy, though the IMF finds it could not shelter the non-oil economy completely. Norway's example is frequently invoked as a model for resource-rich developing countries; the evidence that this model can be transplanted to states without Norway's prior institutional quality is weak.The Discipline of Scarcity
The mechanism at work in Singapore, Switzerland, and Luxembourg depends on conditions that have to be named before any stronger claim can be made, and enlightened leadership is not among them.
The mechanism does not operate universally. A resource-poor country that also lacks small size, external trade orientation, a geographic or positional trade advantage, or sufficient baseline state capacity will not follow the same path. Landlocked sub-Saharan states that earn little from minerals or hydrocarbons show that the absence of commodity rents can coexist with low incomes and limited state capacity. Malawi is a clear example: its exports are dominated by tobacco, its rich deposits of graphite, titanium, uranium and rare earths have so far yielded little revenue, and its GDP per head was about USD 670 in 2025. Scarcity on its own produces nothing, but under specific conditions it creates a particular set of fiscal and institutional pressures. Whether those pressures produce institutional development depends on whether a state has the capacity to respond to them productively rather than failing.
Where those conditions are met, the mechanism runs as follows. A state that cannot extract commodity rents must extract taxes, because its fiscal survival depends on them.
Joseph Schumpeter identified the analytical importance of that fiscal necessity in a 1918 essay on the crisis of the tax state, arguing that the mode of fiscal extraction shapes the entire character of the state, its administrative apparatus, its relationship to civil society, and its institutional form. Charles Tilly pressed the argument further in “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”: states that must fund war against external rivals through taxation of their own populations build the administrative apparatus to extract that taxation, and that same apparatus becomes the infrastructure of governance more broadly. A state that must tax must, over time and under political pressure, build the legal, administrative, and regulatory infrastructure that makes taxation legitimate and compliance rational. The pressure is arithmetical: a government that cannot induce compliance will not collect enough to govern.
A second pressure follows. A small, trade-dependent state that taxes rather than rents cannot protect inefficient domestic industries behind high tariff walls without paying an immediate and visible cost in living standards that is directly attributable to the policy. In a small, open economy, citizens are price-takers in global markets. Protectionism is not a viable long-run strategy, and competitiveness becomes a condition of political sustainability. Singapore’s total trade in goods and services came to about 320 percent of GDP in 2025. Policy pushed in that direction, but the arithmetic was never optional: the economy has no domestic resource base to shelter behind, and its living standards depend entirely on the value of what it offers to the world.
A third follows from that. A small state whose competitiveness depends on attracting foreign capital, multinational operations, and international financial services must offer rule-of-law guarantees that larger states, whose domestic market size provides leverage, can afford not to offer. If Singapore’s courts do not enforce contracts reliably, its regulatory environment is unpredictable, or its bureaucracy is extractively corrupt, the financial services operations and logistics companies that constitute a large share of its economy move to Hong Kong, or Dubai, or the Netherlands. The state’s revenue base depends on maintaining an institutional environment that internationally mobile capital will choose over alternatives. Singapore cannot rely on market size, resource wealth, or strategic military dominance to compensate for institutional quality, which is the only durable offer it has.
The fourth is sectoral. Resource-poor states unable to compete in commodity markets they cannot supply face structural pressure toward high-value traded sectors such as finance, logistics, pharmaceuticals, and specialist manufacturing. These are the industries most sensitive to contract reliability, regulatory predictability, and rule-of-law infrastructure. The process is one of selection: countries that developed the institutional environment that internationally mobile high-value industries require attracted those industries, and the others went without. The service-sector and knowledge-economy specialisation visible in Singapore, Switzerland, and Luxembourg is the sectoral outcome of an institutional selection process that operated over decades. States that failed to build the relevant institutional capacities at each step lost economic activity, stagnated, or collapsed, so the cases we observe are the survivors.
James C. Scott characterised state legibility, the capacity to render society measurable, taxable, and administratively visible, as a precondition for state capacity of any kind. The point generalises: states that were forced by fiscal necessity to achieve legibility over their economies built the administrative infrastructure that more fortunate states could defer.
Four Cases
Singapore, Switzerland, and Luxembourg illustrate the mechanism from different starting points and through different institutional forms. The Netherlands plays a different analytical role, as a stress test showing that resource rents introduce the rentier dynamic even in environments not built on them.
Singapore. When the island left the Federation of Malaysia in 1965, pushed out after two years of political conflict and a separation negotiated in secret, it had no hinterland, no natural resources, and no obvious basis for economic viability. The Economic Development Board had been set up in 1961, four years before separation, to drive industrialisation. After 1965 it became the institutional expression of that structural problem, shifting from import substitution to courting export-oriented foreign investors. Around it the state assembled the rest of its offer: meritocratic recruitment in an environment where patronage networks would have been economically fatal; aggressive anti-corruption enforcement, through the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (founded in 1952) and the 1960 Prevention of Corruption Act, in a state that could not afford to price itself out of the foreign investment market; and predictable rule of law for commercial purposes as the primary value proposition to multinational firms weighing Singapore against other regional locations. These were the policy expressions of a state facing existential fiscal pressure with limited room for error, whatever the virtues of the people who made them.
The complication is that Singapore’s institutional model has significant authoritarian features. Press freedoms are restricted: Reporters Without Borders ranked Singapore 123rd out of 180 countries in 2026. Political opposition operates under structural disadvantage. Defamation law has been deployed against critics of the government in ways that most liberal democratic frameworks would regard as incompatible with political accountability. The “good governance” story about Singapore is accurate about commercial rule of law and state administrative capacity; it is significantly less accurate about political governance in the liberal sense. The institutional development the scarcity mechanism produced in Singapore was partial (high quality for economic purposes, restrictive for political ones), and this configuration challenges the assumption, common in liberal development frameworks, that economic institutional quality and political accountability necessarily develop together.
Switzerland. Landlocked, mountainous, with no significant mineral endowments beyond hydroelectric capacity that functions as a domestic energy input rather than a rent-generating export, Switzerland’s wealth looks structurally inexplicable if the lens is resource endowment. The financial sector, headquartered in Zurich and Geneva, and the pharmaceutical cluster anchored in Basel are the dominant export industries. Swiss pharmaceuticals and related life sciences made up approximately 38.5 percent of goods exports (excluding precious metals and gems) in 2023. Both industries are among those most sensitive to contract reliability, regulatory predictability, and political neutrality, the conditions that keep a small state open to internationally mobile capital whose home governments distrust one another. Until Switzerland adopted the automatic exchange of tax information in 2017, banking secrecy belonged on that list too.
Swiss federalism and direct democracy matter here as mechanisms for maintaining the credibility of policy commitments over time. A constitutional system that distributes power across cantons and submits major questions to popular vote is structurally resistant to rapid, discretionary policy change that makes long-horizon business commitments risky — and that resistance is valuable to internationally mobile capital in ways that more centralised systems struggle to replicate.
Luxembourg. Luxembourg is the sharpest example of structural adaptation in this group, and the one that most clearly refutes the idea that institutional development is a natural consequence of virtue. Steel constituted approximately 30 percent of Luxembourg’s GDP in 1960. When the steel crisis that began in 1975 shrank that industry to about 12 percent of GDP by 1980 and 2 percent by 2011, Luxembourg had to reinvent its economic model or decline. The financial centre that replaced steel as the dominant sector had been taking shape for more than a decade, built through specific regulatory choices: a favourable 1929 holding-company law (phased out between 2006 and 2010 after the European Commission ruled it illegal state aid), a tax treaty network that created arbitrage opportunities, and a regulatory environment flexible enough that Luxembourg was the venue of choice when S.G. Warburg arranged the first Eurobond, an Autostrade issue listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange in July 1963. Those network effects compounded from that early positioning.
Luxembourg’s institutional quality is real, but its story involves regulatory arbitrage as much as institutional virtue, and it is morally more mixed. Its financial sector benefited from being small enough that large states did not find it worth suppressing, from being inside the European regulatory framework while optimising within it, and from the compounding advantages of early positioning in markets where liquidity and legal infrastructure become self-reinforcing.
The Netherlands (stress test). The Netherlands entered its encounter with resource wealth from a structurally different starting point than the other three cases. Rotterdam was already Europe’s dominant logistics hub, processing Rhine-corridor cargo as the primary gateway for European interior trade, before the Groningen gas field was discovered in 1959. It had held that position for decades, and from 1962 until 2004 it would be the world’s busiest port by annual cargo tonnage. Amsterdam’s financial and insurance markets had their origins in early modern trade finance, making the Dutch financial sector one of the oldest continuously operating financial systems in the world. The institutional foundation was trade-dependent and taxation-based: a state financed by taxing merchants and trade, with no commodity rents in the picture.
The Groningen gas discovery changed this partly and temporarily. The term “Dutch Disease” was coined by The Economist in November 1977 to describe what had happened: gas export revenues appreciated the guilder, raising the cost of Dutch manufactured goods and tradeable services in international markets and eroding competitiveness in exactly the sectors that the institutional base had been built to support. The disease works mainly through the exchange rate and wage mechanisms by which resource rents crowd out other traded sectors; corruption and governance failure are not its primary cause.
The Netherlands recovered in the 1980s, chiefly through the 1982 Wassenaar Agreement on wage moderation and a sustained fiscal consolidation. Groningen, meanwhile, kept producing for four more decades, until earthquakes caused by extraction led to its closure by law in April 2024. The recovery worked because the institutional base predated the resource episode and was structurally deeper than it. What the Dutch case adds is specific: the competitiveness-erosion variant of the resource curse operates even in well-governed states. The Netherlands had the capacity to survive the encounter and still felt the strain. Nigeria, encountering oil revenues without that prior institutional foundation, did not recover.
Singapore's authoritarian features
Singapore regularly scores in the top tier of global rankings for rule of law, control of corruption, contract enforcement, and government effectiveness. It sits in the bottom third of press freedom rankings and is rated only "Partly Free" by Freedom House. The country's political system has been dominated by the People's Action Party since 1959; opposition parties operate under structural disadvantages including electoral boundaries, defamation litigation, and restrictions on political assembly.What the Cases Do Not Teach
The structural conditions that produced institutional development in Singapore, Luxembourg, and Switzerland were not replicable by policy choice, and describing them as such would be a serious mistake.
Singapore sits at the southern end of the Strait of Malacca, the main shipping lane between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, through which about 29 percent of all seaborne oil passed in the first half of 2025. That position in global shipping networks cannot be legislated into existence elsewhere. It was a precondition rather than a policy achievement: it made trade-based development viable and made the institutional investment in trade facilitation economically rational. Switzerland’s financial credibility accumulated over centuries of political neutrality, accumulated treaty relationships, and the compounding of depositor trust in an environment where legal protections were reliably enforced over long periods. Path-dependent advantages of that kind are not rapidly imitable; a developing country that decided tomorrow to become a financial centre would not reproduce Geneva in a generation. Luxembourg’s Eurobond market succeeded partly because it was small enough, in the 1960s, that larger European states did not perceive it as a competitive threat sufficiently significant to suppress. The regulatory space it occupied was available partly because of Luxembourg’s size. That opportunity no longer exists in the same form.
The mechanism described in the previous section operated in states with specific preconditions that most developing countries cannot rapidly acquire: a geographic or positional trade advantage, sufficient baseline state capacity to respond productively to fiscal pressure, and a size and economic structure that made trade-based competition viable. The resource-poor landlocked states of sub-Saharan Africa face fiscal pressure without these preconditions. Scarcity there has produced stagnation and fragility instead of institutional development. The mechanism works only where those conditions are already in place, and they are matters of geography, size and state capacity that neither culture nor will can supply.
This implies something uncomfortable for development policy. The countries most likely to benefit from resource extraction are those with the institutional quality to manage it well, which means resource wealth is most useful to the countries that need it least. Acemoglu and Robinson have argued that inclusive institutions determine whether a country can use its endowments productively, rather than the endowments themselves determining outcomes. The implication is that institutional quality is the prior variable. A country with strong institutions will develop whether or not it has resources; a country without strong institutions will struggle whether or not it has resources. Under this framing, resource wealth amplifies existing institutional conditions: it helps where institutions are strong and corrodes where they are weak.
The relationship between revenue source and accountability is structural, and this is where development policy’s thinking most needs updating. A state financing itself through rents, whether from oil, gas, minerals, or large-scale external aid, faces a version of the fiscal political economy of the rentier states described in the previous section. Development policy that concentrates on revenue management, such as sovereign wealth fund design, anti-corruption legislation, and resource contract transparency, without addressing how revenue extraction from the productive economy is structured risks reproducing the rentier dynamic, because the dynamic is generated by the relationship between state and taxpayer, not by the identity of what the state is selling.
The parallel with aid dependence is contested but analytically serious. Deborah Bräutigam and Stephen Knack found that high levels of foreign aid in sub-Saharan Africa were associated with declining governance quality: weakened accountability, reduced pressure to reform inefficient institutions, and bureaucracies organised around external transfers rather than domestic tax compliance. Moss, Pettersson, and van de Walle extended the argument in a review essay: aid-dependent governments exhibit fiscal structures analogous to rentier states, financed by external transfers rather than domestic taxation, facing reduced incentives to maintain accountability relationships with their own citizens. Dambisa Moyo later popularised a version of this argument, to wider but more contested reception. The peer-reviewed evidence is mixed at the level of magnitude, but the fiscal logic is coherent: if the mechanism by which resource rents corrode institutional development runs through the taxation relationship, then any external revenue source that substitutes for taxation could, in principle, produce similar effects. On that logic, what a state does with money it raises from citizens matters less than how it came to have money at all. Earlier, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson had used differences in European settler mortality to argue that institutions are a primary determinant of long-run income differences, reinforcing that argument at the foundations.
What necessity builds
Return to the water treaty. Singapore negotiates with Malaysia over three Malaysian sen per thousand gallons of raw water because no number of engineering solutions removes the underlying geopolitical vulnerability of a small state dependent on a neighbour it cannot coerce. Singapore treats that vulnerability with the same institutional seriousness it brings to everything else its economic position requires, from desalination plants to reclamation projects and strategic water reserves.
Nigeria has not faced that structural necessity, and the fiscal logic of oil rent has, for decades, removed the pressure to build it. The persistent inversion of endowments and outcomes has a structural answer, and the answer holds only with its conditions attached.
The most unsettling implication concerns the resource-rich: they face a structural headwind that good policy alone cannot reliably overcome. Norway managed it, in a specific historical sequence, with institutional preconditions that took generations to accumulate. Botswana, among the world’s poorest countries at independence in 1966 and upper-middle-income since the late 1990s on the back of diamonds discovered a year after independence, shows the exception is possible without Norway’s head start, but the list of such exceptions remains short. For the large number of developing countries now discovering or anticipating significant resource wealth across sub-Saharan Africa and in parts of Central Asia and South America, development institutions have found no general answer to that structural problem. Better contracts, more transparent revenue reporting, and improved sovereign wealth fund design are real improvements at the margin, but they do not, by themselves, resolve the fiscal political economy that resource rents create.
Good decisions do not produce good outcomes regardless of structural context, and the absence of resources is not, in itself, an advantage. Singapore needed water self-sufficiency because it could not afford to depend on the treaty, and the necessity made it build something. Most countries do not get to choose whether they have that kind of necessity, and the ones that got the resources instead are still, in the main, waiting for them to help.
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