otswana, now a middle-income country, was one of the poorest countries in the world at independence (1966). According to Harvey (2015), Botswana recorded the highest growth in per capita income in the world between 1965 and 1998. Between 1998 and 2011, the growth rate of the GDP averaged approximately 3%(Harvey, 2015). De Beers (2015) records the GDP per capita growth between 1966 and 2014 at an average of 5.9%. The exceptional growth rates have been attributed to the mining sector.

The contribution of mining to GDP is expected because abundant natural resources bring with them high revenues that can be translated into high GDP growth. Unfortunately, for other developing countries with similar resource abundance, their economic performance is lower than those of resource-poor countries–the so-called resource curse phenomenon (Sachs & Warner, 2001). Botswana is one of the few countries (together with the likes of Canada, Norway and Australia) that seems to have avoided the resource curse. Botswana has possibly avoided the resource curse because of well-established institutions and generally good management of resource proceeds. For instance, to guarantee sustainability, government budgeting pursues the broad principle followed by most other mineral-based economies: the Sustainable Budget Index (share of non-investment expenditure to non-mineral revenues). An SBI value above 1 implies that non-investment spending is funded in part from mineral (non-recurrent) revenues. A value below 1 means that the budget is sustainable ie mineral revenue is either being saved/consumed

Projects

Currently no objects available

Currently no objects available