This suggests that the resource-rich democracies underinvest. In fact, this is no surprise. Other researchers have found that quite generally democracies tend to underinvest: governments are so fixated on winning the next election that they disregard what might happen afterward, and so neglect investments that only come to fruition in the future. In resource-rich societies investment is evidently particularly important since this is how the resource surplus can be transformed into sustained increases in income; underinvesting becomes an even more important mistake. However, the main story
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