Aims, Approach, and Structure of the Study

This study sheds new light on several development controversies in addition to the resource curse including industrial policy, premature deindustrialization, urban bias, rural neglect, and dual track reform. The approach uses two stylized facts rent-driven models to analyze the political economy of economic development. It illustrates the models with two country case studies: high-rent Trinidad and Tobago and low-rent Mauritius. The stylized facts models provide a nuanced explanation of the rent curse and are applied to compare and explain the contrasting post-1960 development outcomes in five principal global developing regions: sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, East Asia, South Asia, and the Gulf.