Publication

This paper analyzes how political incentives are shaped by commodity revenue. It focuses on commodity rent flows as the critical link between the economy and politics, and uses case studies to track them. The author applies Botswana’s successful rent cycling to identify why Zambia, Nigeria and Angola failed. He attributes Botswana’s success in managing a large concentrated rent stream not only to ethnic homogeneity and rejection of statist policies, but also to the incentives for caution arising from its singularly precarious mineral dependence and also the unexpected stability of diamond prices.