Suggested Citation:
El-Gamal, Mahmoud Amin and Amy Myers Jaffe (2009) Subpriming the Pump. Foreign Policy, 99 - 101

The resource curse has gone global. For years, oil wealth was mostly a danger to those, paradoxically, who possessed it. Resource-rich Middle Eastern countries, and their labor-exporting neighbors, failed for decades to invest adequately in their people or to diversify their economies. A massive influx of oil receipts and worker remittances discouraged investment in sectors conductive to steady long-term growth, fostered corruption and patronage, inflated regional real estate and stock markets, and provided irresistible incentives for governments to spend with wasteful, shortsighted abandon.