Extractive Industries ― The Management of Resources As a Driver of Sustainable Development

New initiatives recognize that resource wealth can provide a means, when properly used, for poorer nations to decisively break with poverty by diversifying economies and funding development spending. Extractive Industries: The Management of Resources as a Driver of Sustainable Development explores the challenges and opportunities facing developing countries in using oil, gas, and mining to achieve inclusive change.

While resource wealth can yield prosperity it can also, when mismanaged, cause acute social inequality, deep poverty, environmental damage, and political instability. There is a new determination to improve the benefits of extractive industries to their host countries, and to strengthen the sector's governance. Extractive Industries provides a comprehensive contribution to what must be done in this sector to deliver development, protect often fragile environments from damage, enhance the rights of affected communities, and support climate change action. It brings together international experts to offer ideas and recommendations in the main policy areas. With a breadth of collective insight and experience, it argues that more attention must be given to the development role of extractive industries, and looks to the future to explain how action on climate change will profoundly shape the sector's prospects.

Tony Addison is the Chief Economist/Deputy Director of the United Nations University's World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) in Helsinki, Finland. He was previously Professor of Development Studies at the University of Manchester, Executive Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute (BWPI) at the University of Manchester, and Associate Director of the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC). He has also held positions at the University of Warwick, the School of Oriental and African Studies (London University), and the Overseas Development Institute (London). He has published widely in books and journals on the issues of post-conflict reconstruction, debt relief, fiscal policy, poverty dynamics, development finance, and foreign aid.

Alan Roe has worked for more than 45 years as an academic economist and as a policy adviser. Early in his career he was a research economist at the University of Dar-es-Salaam and then at the University of Cambridge (Economic Growth Project) and later a Visiting Professor of Economics at Washington University in the USA. He then taught economics for many years at the University of Warwick where he was also for a period the Chairman of Department. In 1994 he was appointed Principal Economist at the World Bank where he worked for 7 years. After retiring from the Bank in 2000, he returned part-time to Warwick University but also joined Oxford Policy Management (OPM) as Principal Economist and a Board Director. In this capacity he helped to initiate OPM's involvement in natural resources issues. Now retired he remains as a Senior Associate at both OPM and the University of Warwick and a Senior Non-Resident Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER.