by Karl Widerquist | Dec 13, 2011 | News, The Indepentarian
Libya has been a classic case of the resource curse: enormous resource wealth (even on a per-person basis), but instead of prosperity, the windfall has coincided with poverty and political oppression. The new government now has the job of finding a way to lift the curse on Libya. A recent editorial by Kevin Voigt of CNN suggests that one of the best ways to do so would be to embrace, what he calls, the “Alaska solution:” distribute some of the oil revenue directly to the people. The article examines other cases such as Norway, Mongolia, and Bolivia to find lessons for how to avoid the resource curse and to bolster the case for the Alaska solution.
The editorial, “The ‘resource curse’: An Alaskan solution for Libya?” by Kevin Voigt of CNN
September 6, 2011, is online at:
https://edition.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/09/05/libya.oil.resource.curse/index.html
by Karl Widerquist | Mar 17, 2010 | News, The Indepentarian
According to Knight Ridder, the Libyan dictator, Colonel Mouammar Kadhafi has pledged to abolish the oil ministry and distribute oil revenues directly to the people. Kadhafi said, according to Reuters, “All citizens have the right to benefit from the oil funds. They should take the money and do whatever they want with it.” He said that the committees that run the oil ministry and other government agencies have failed. “These committees will be replaced spontaneously by real committees to be created everywhere by citizens. Citizens will get part of the oil revenue directly. They don’t need intermediaries.” How these citizen committees will be able to distribute money directly to the people is unclear. Khadafi has made similar statements in the past, and so we should not necessarily expect the creation of a Libyan oil dividend to be imminent.
For more on this issue, see:
Ministries Abolished, Oil Revenues to be Distributed to Libyans
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News Monday, March 03, 2008
https://libcom.org/forums/news/libya-abolish-most-ministries-oil-revenue-be-distributed-04032008
