April 19, 2026 — The Natural Resource Curse [NRC] refers to negative effects that a booming commodity sector can have on a country’s overall economic growth. (Commodities are defined to include oil and natural gas, minerals, and often agriculture.) Many oil-rich producers in the Mideast and Africa, for example, have failed to achieve the prosperity that some resource-poor rocky islands and peninsulas in East Asia have.
Some are now applying the idea of a NRC to the US, which is said to be acting like a petrostate in that a revival of the oil and gas sector is crowding out technologically advanced manufacturers of renewable energy equipment.