A few years ago I was first exposed to the counter-intuitive concept of the curse of natural resources. As a prime example, The Democratic Republic of the Congo contains some of the most saught after natural resources on the planet. These include an abundance of valuable, rare metals such as cobalt, cadmium, gold, silver, zinc, manganese and many more along with gem diamonds, germanium, and uranium. Despite having all these incredible, desirable resources, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, year after year, continues to be counted among the poorest countries in the world with low GDP, a GDP per capita well below $1,000, as well as low literacy rates with roughly a third of the nation's adults unable to read.

How can it be that such a resource-wealthy country can be so deprived of societal wealth? The common logic is that countries that lack natural resources have to base their economies in human resources. This means educating and developing a skilled labor force from their citizens to drive the economy. Israel, a country that has seen its GDP triple in the past twenty years, is one of the few countries in the Middle East that doesn't benefit from tons of natural oil wealth. However, the tiny nation has done an incredible job of educating its citizens to produce manufactured goods and services to drive the immense growth. Its primary exports include machinery, software, and cut diamonds, all products of human invention and design. A country rich in natural wealth does not need to develop its citizens in order to meet its budgetary needs and so it often doesn't. As a result, the nation never truly prospers and its leaders are happy to settle for the immidiate wealth provided by its resources as opposed to the long term investment of developing its people.

Obviously, this situation is much more complex and nuanced than the given explanation. In this project I set out to examine the extent of the curse of natural resources and hopefully shed some light on the topic to get a better sense of how the global economy actually plays out. To do this I collect over 20 years of data from the CIA Factbook to analyze in the hope of making some more sense of the world's economic imbalance.