Insights from Africa and South America For a long time, economists have warned that abundant natural resources are bad for economic development because their exploitation stunts manufacturing exports, favours rent-seeking activities by politically well-connected people, and generally leads to unsustainable policies for which, as so often, the poor end up paying the price with lost growth and opportunity. But over the last few years, the so-called resource curse has been revisited as historically uninformed, theoretically unsatisfactory, empirically incorrect, and largely useless for development policy.