Single-commodity dependence correlates with corruption and extreme income skew

Evidence

As a rule of thumb, the greater a nation’s reliance on a single product for its economic survival, the higher the chances that that society is riddled with corruption and afflicted by profoundly skewed income distribution. Nigeria’s dependence on oil is absolute: it constitutes 96 percent of Nigeria’s export revenue and generates 80 percent of government income. Thus Nigerian oil (of which the United States buys 40 percent) has readily become a precondition of and a byword for militarization. The petro-state has given rise, moreover, to a society in which 85 percent of oil wealth goes to a mere 1 percent of the populace, almost none of whom belong to the micro-minorities who inhabit, ingest, and inhale the ecological devastation. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 299

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supplies the resource-curse data (ch.14) and ‘oil wealth fails to translate into human development’ (ch.20) for cross-course use in Eco-Justice. — connects to: Mineral wealth concentrated in a single resource typically breeds authoritarian, corrupt, unstable states — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 190; Southern megadams masked dependence and corruption beneath independence glamour — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 466