Fiscal Policy

A five-part series examining why the countries best endowed with natural resources are so frequently the worst governed, and how the arithmetic of commodity dependence — not culture, not climate, not colonial history alone — explains the pattern.

Uganda reduced its debt-to-GDP ratio from 96% to 28% after HIPC completion and has kept it there for twenty years. Botswana has never been in debt distress despite being a resource economy. Ecuador's 2023 Galápagos debt-for-nature swap saved $390 million in interest payments while funding marine conservation. The countries that escaped the debt architecture share five characteristics. None of them is luck.

An analysis of the specific fiscal and monetary mechanisms used to extract wealth from colonial India.

The brutal logic of maintaining grain exports and tax collections during the peak of catastrophic survival crises.

An analysis of the 18d. exchange rate and the $212 billion gold drain during the Great Depression.