Rizzati Valentina

The Development Stories of Equatorial Guinea and Botswana Rizzati Valentina

What is the interaction between a country's institutions and its practice of resource exploitation?The Development Stories of Equatorial Guinea and Botswana studies and compares these two countries' growth acceleration episodes and their vulnerability to the "resource curse" phenomenon following the respective discoveries of diamonds and oil. While Botswana, characterized by inclusive and democratic institutions, succeeded in transferring much of the benefits deriving from the natural resource exploitation to society, Equatorial Guinea's corrupt government retained all the oil-generated wealth and prevented the population's standard of living from improving. The book focuses first on comparing the two countries' development records and on understanding the discrepancy between the two growth acceleration episodes. The second section analyses Public-Private Partnerships' potential benefits for the developing world via an empirical Game Theoretic methodology. As it will be finally unveiled,the results of this coordination exercise between public and private parties will present very different implications for a democratic country as Botswana and for a corrupt one as Equatorial Guinea.