ANT 160 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Sub-Saharan Africa, Resource Curse, Capital Flight
4 Dec 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Presence or absence of natural features helping or limiting communication. Historically, geography has prevented or slowed the spread of new technology to areas such as the americas and sub-saharan africa. the climate also limits what crops and farm animals may be sued on similarly fertile lands. On the other hand, research on the resource curse has found that countries with an abundance of natural resources creating quick wealth from exports tend to have less long-term prosperity than countries with less of these natural resources. Capital flight by which the wealthy in a society shift their assets to offshore tax havens deprives nations of revenue needed to break the vicious cycle of poverty. Weakly entrenched formal systems of title to private property are seen by writers such as hernando de soto as a limit to economic growth and therefore a cause of poverty.
