Norway, the world's third largest oil exporter, passively invests a large portion of proceeds into a national pension fund. "The future-generations fund," which is now worth $300 billion, invests into foreign assets only as a way to remove the temptation for politicians to spend money on pork-barrel projects. Can oil-rich African countries follow the Scandinavian path or are they destined to suffer under the resource course?
John Ghazvinian, the author of "Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil," is pessimistic: "Between 1970 and 1993, countries without oil saw their economies grow four times faster than those of countries with oil."
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