Resource Abundance and Economic Growth

It seems reasonable to assume that countries that have a lot of resources (oil, gold, diamonds, etc.) would experience high economic growth . Looking at the high oil prices today, not many people will deny that statement.

But for the past 30 to 40 years, economic growth for resource abundant countries have been slower compared to countries that do not even have any resources at all. For example, oil rich countries like Nigeria, Venezuela and Iran have all experienced negative growth rate from the 1980s to 2000. Yet, resource-scarce countries like the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore) have experienced rapid growth during that time period.

There are several reasons that have been proposed on why that happens.

• Dutch Disease Model. Basically a resource boom will cause labour to move from manufacturing to the booming resource sector. Sees a decline in manufacturing industries. Growth is reduced since manufacturing accounts for a large portion of R&D and growth.
• Education. Resource rich countries tend to allocate less funds to education.
  
• Corruption
• Failure to Diversify. The dependency on oil would make the economy very volatile.
• Distribution of Wealth. Only a small portion of the economy benefits from the resource boom.
  

Question time. Venezuela is one of the major oil producers in the world. But its growth is slow from 1970s to the 1990s. Does the lack of focus on education explains that lack of growth ? How ? There is no prizes for this, but I'm just trying to increase the amount of discussion here :)


By the way, thank you all for the valuable comments so far. It has been interesting to learn from all the different perspectives.