Headline economic performance during the boom was strong but proved unsustainable. Resource-rich countries saw economic growth rise during the boom years driven by resource exports and increased government revenues. However, economic growth once we subtract the expanding resource sector, was not significantly higher than the rest of Africa. This reflects the overall dominance of the resource sector as a driver of growth, but also implies a failure to translate the boom into broader based economic prosperity. The starkest evidence for an unsustainable and narrow economic boom was seen in the slump in growth rates following the fall in commodity prices. In the post-boom period, annual GDP per capita growth in resource-rich countries was on average 2.5 percentage points lower than during the boom, and 1.5 percentage points lower than non-resource rich countries in the region.

Overall, resource-rich countries suffered a ‘missed opportunity’ to translate significant revenues and growth acceleration into sustainable and broad-based prosperity. Even during the boom years, the lack of inclusive growth was seen in other economic measures such as the rising poverty headcount and growing inequality – both of which deteriorated in resource-rich African countries during this period on average.

The legacy of the boom was characterized by countries being poorly prepared for the drop in commodity prices. Many had failed to save and invest a sufficient proportion of resource revenues to grow national wealth via the accumulation offsetting assets during the boom. As a consequence, the ‘bust’ period undermined the economic gains made during the boom. One extreme of this saw several resource-rich countries enter debt crises post-2014. This post-boom (or ‘bust) period (2015-2018) has also seen a more general pattern of resourcerich countries experiencing slumps in GDP growth and non-resource sector GDP growth, with rates of both falling below those of the rest of Africa.

The legacy of the boom is therefore one of missed opportunity, overhanging macroeconomic vulnerability, and increasing concentrations of the world’s poor in resource-rich Sub-Saharan Africa.

Most alarmingly we find that by 2030, on current projections even after adjusting all countries for the impacts of COVID-19, 80 percent of the world’s poor will reside in SubSaharan Africa, while 75 percent of the world’s poor will be found in resource-rich countries. Taken together, 62 percent of the extreme poor could be concentrated in resource-rich Sub-Saharan Africa. This is up from only 13 percent in 2000.

The findings of this study are in line with those documented in the literature on the resource curse. Recent surveys such as Van der Ploeg (2011) and Ross (2015) point towards the challenges resource-rich developing countries have faced translating price booms into sustained prosperity. While the cross-country empirical evidence does not support the hypothesis that this is a problem restricted to African countries, studies do suggest that weaker political and economic institutions may exacerbate the challenges countries face harnessing resource wealth for economic development (Mehlum, Moene, and Torvik 2006).

The rest of the study is organized as follows. The next section 2 examines the four main outcomes of the boom relating to i) resource dependency, ii) economic growth iii) poverty 6