*partie=titre "TREASURE OR TRASH?": THE WORLD BANK'S FLAWED DEFENSE OF MINING AS A TOOL FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT *partie=nil EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The World Bank Group's (the Bank) Mining Department has recently begun to produce a series of short papers on the impacts of mining in developing countries. The stated purpose of first paper, entitled Treasure or Trouble? Mining in Developing Countries, is to assess the impacts of mineral sector development on economic growth. But Treasure or Trouble? also has an unstated purpose-- to defend the operations of the Mining Department against growing criticisms that mineral extraction does not contribute much to economic development or poverty alleviation. This is of immediate concern to the Mining Department, since its operations are currently being publicly scrutinized by the World sBank's Extractive Industries Review. Not surprisingly, Treasure or Trouble concludes that mining can contribute to economic growth in the right economic and institutional setting. The paper, however, is marred by a variety of conceptual and methodological weaknesses which limit its persuasiveness as a description of the contribution of mining to economic growth, and, more importantly, as a justification for the Bank's involvement in the mining sector. These include: Data Actually Suggests that Mining Hampers Growth: The paper concedes that its evidence shows that, "countries with substantial incomes from mining performed less well than countries with less income from mining." Failure to Address Poverty Impacts: The paper fails to address what should be the central economic question for the World Bank Group: how does mineral extraction impact its core mission of poverty alleviation? Inadequate Theoretical Defense for World Bank Group Activities: The paper offers several hypotheses of how mineral development could potentially contribute to growth. In practice, however, the Bank does not actually follow the policy prescriptions suggested by these explanations. As a result, the theories proffered in the paper do not support the Bank's actual interventions in the mining sector. The paper ultimately concludes that good development benefits can only be achieved in ining countries that properly regulate their mining industries and adequately manage its revenues. But it is not clear from the study that these benefits can be reliably achieved even in such well-governed countries. Nevertheless, since the Bank often finances mining projects where adequate regulatory and enforcement capacity is demonstrably absent, even *{ this modest conclusion amounts to a strong indictment of the Mining Department's current lending practices. } *partie=titre I. INTRODUCTION *partie=nil The World Bank Group promotes mineral extraction as a means by which developing countries can reduce poverty, improve living conditions and catalyze economic growth.1 However, the assumption that mining can effectively deliver these benefits has been sharply criticized by a variety of development experts. Observers have pointed out that mineral dependence is strongly associated with low growth rates,2 poor governance,3 and unusually bad conditions for the poor, including low performance on a wide array of human development indicators.4 Observers have also noted that individual mining projects often can cause substantial local harms, including environmental degradation, social and economic dislocation, and a variety of public health problems. In response to some of these criticisms, the Mining Department of the Bank has produced a study of the economic impacts of mineral development. The study, entitled Treasure or Trouble? Mining in Developing Countries, explores the relationship between mineral dependence and economic growth. Its most compelling finding is that "countries with substantial incomes from mining performed less well than countries with less income from mining."5 The Mining Department nevertheless seeks to avoid this (rather inconvenient) conclusion by arguing that mining countries often outperform other countries in their geographic regions, and that mining can contribute to economic growth in the right economic and institutional setting. These arguments, however, are unpersuasive. The paper fails to provide a convincing justification for this regional focus, and its conclusions regarding the importance of institutions and governance are ad hoc, impressionistic, and not well supported. Ultimately, these arguments do little to refute even its own evidence that mineral dependence is actually a drag on economic growth. Treasure or Trouble? should also be understood as an implicit argument for continued (or expanded) World Bank Group involvement in the mining sector. After all, the Mining Department is not a disinterested observer of the mining industry. It is rather an entity with a deep institutional and financial commitment to mining, and one whose very existence depends upon a continued role for the Bank in the sector.6 The World Bank Extractive Industries Review is currently reviewing how the Mining Department's activities contribute to the Bank's core objectives of poverty alleviation and sustainable development. Treasure or Trouble? is part of the Mining Department's ongoing effort to explain how its activities help the Bank to achieve these objectives. The paper is unconvincing on these grounds as well. It explicitly declines to address what should be the central question regarding Bank financing of mining projects--whether mineral extraction advances the core mission of sustainable poverty alleviation.7 Moreover, its theoretical arguments for how mining could contribute to economic development are mostly irrelevant to the World Bank Group's actual lending practices. *partie=titre II. THE STUDY *partie=nil Treasure or Trouble? compares the growth rates for 51 mining countries during the 1990s, and analyzes them in two different ways. It first assesses how economic growth varies with the importance of the mining sector in the economy. Towards that end, the paper groups countries into three categories based upon how much of the country's export income is earned by the mining sector--"dominant," (more than 50 percent of exports); "crucial" (15 to 50 percent of exports); and "relevant" (5 to 15 percent of exports). It also considers a fourth category, "domestically important," in which mining makes important contributions to the domestic economy by providing raw materials for domestic processing and production. Then, the paper considers how mining countries perform in comparison to other countries in their geographic areas. To make this regional comparison, the paper compares the growth rates of individual mining countries, and mining countries as a group, with the average growth rate for all countries in the region. *partie=titre KEY FINDING: MINERAL DEPENDENCE IS NEGATIVELY CORRELATED WITH GROWTH *partie=nil The data cited in the report support the conclusion that mineral dependence is actually a drag on economic growth. The Mining Department concedes, ". . .the growth performance of mining countries as a group seems indeed to suggest that countries with substantial incomes from mining performed less well than countries with less income from mining."8 The study found that, on average, the greater the percentage of a country's exports produced by the mining sector, the worse its economic growth. Countries in which the mining sector dominated exports had the worst aggregate growth rates of all the categories, actually contracting by 2.3 percent throughout the 1990s. Countries in which the mining sector was critical to exports contracted by 1.1 percent, while countries in which the mining sector was relevant contracted by .75 percent.9 Dramatic disparities were also apparent with respect to per capita incomes. Countries in the "dominant" and "critical" categories had income levels that were less than one-third of those in the "relevant" category, perhaps suggesting that they have been growing more slowly for quite some time.10 Moreover, because of an anomaly in the way national income is calculated, the true performance of all of the countries was even more disappointing than the paper would suggest. The current system of national accounts considers all of the revenue earned from depleting mineral resources as income. But much of that revenue is actually realized through the sale of capital assets--the country's mineral reserves. Unless this error is corrected by accounting for the depletion of the asset base, it can dramatically overstate the economic performance of countries that rely heavily on extractive industries. Indeed, the greater a country's dependence on extraction, the more distortionary this error becomes. As a result, the actual performance of countries in the "dominant" and "crucial" categories was most likely worse than the study suggests.11 Consider Chile, a country that the paper lauds as a star economic performer among mining countries. According to the paper, Chile grew at the impressive rate of almost 5 percent per year throughout the nineties. Researchers have estimated, however, that due to the failure to account for depreciation of the country's natural capital, the economic income generated *{ by the Chilean mining sector has been overestimated by 20­40 per cent, and its rate of growth by 3-20 per cent.12 } Overall, the economic performance of the mining countries included in the study was rather weak and disappointing. The study's evidence that the economic performance tends to decline as reliance on mining increases should inspire deep skepticism in mining as an effective catalyst for economic growth. *partie=titre III. THE (DUBIOUS) CASE FOR MINING'S CONTRIBUTION TO ECONOMIC GROWTH THE WEAKNESS OF THE REGIONAL PERSPECTIVE *partie=nil After conceding that the economic performance of countries that rely heavily on mineral exports lags behind that of countries with more diversified economies, the Mining Department contends that the economic performance of mining countries can be more accurately assessed by comparing their growth rates to those of other countries in their geographic regions. It argues that since *{ ait modifié "[i]nstitutional capital } "institutional capital has a cultural dimension that can have a strong regional component," a regional perspective provides a means to compare the performance of mining countries to other countries with similar cultural, historical and institutional heritages.13 To make these regional comparisons, the paper assigns each country to one of five continental or quasi-continental regions -- Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia. The paper provides little reason to be confident in this approach. It assumes, but does not test, the validity of regions as a meaningful category for economic comparisons. The basis for this assumption is not obvious. Indeed, the paper itself emphasizes that countries within each region can have dramatically different institutional capacities. Given such variation, it is difficult to see why the authors believe that a regional perspective allows comparisons of "like with like."14 Even the eminent authorities cited for this regional approach cannot be fairly read to support it. The most prominent thinker the paper cites, the economics Nobel-laureate Amartya Sen, has forcefully criticized the notion that cultural and historical influences are generalizable across broad geographic regions. Dismissing the concept of "Asian values," Sen argues: even east Asia itself has much diversity, and there are many variations to be found between Japan and China and Korea and other parts of east Asia. Various cultural influences from inside and outside this region have affected human lives over the history of this large territory. These influences still survive in a variety of ways. . . *{ ait modifié [A]ttempts at } Attempts at generalization about "Asian values" . . .cannot but be extremely crude. (emphasis added).15 Like Sen, David Landes, the second expert cited in the paper, emphasizes the importance of influences that are too local for a macro-regional perspective to capture. While Landes highlights the impacts of cultural, intellectual and historical forces on economic performance, he does not believe that these influences are necessarily consistent across broad and arbitrarily defined regions. For example, the paper cites Landes' argument that the intellectual intolerance of Catholic countries in southern Europe after the Reformation prevented them from participating in and prospering from the scientific revolution that flourished in Protestant northern Europe.16 By showing how cultural forces shaped the disparate economic performance of countries within a specific region, Landes' argument contradicts the macro-regional perspective that the Mining Department advocates. The final thinker the paper relies upon to justify its regional approach, David de Ferranti of the World Bank, actually disparages its explanatory power. de Ferranti and his colleagues discount cultural factors in favor of other "structural conditions" as their preferred approach to explaining Latin America's economic performance.17 Given their justification for regional comparisons, the authors should have at least attempted to organize countries into regional groupings based on shared historical experiences or cultural influences. But they do not. Instead they casually construct regional categories that are essentially continental. As Sen and Landes suggest, these groupings are far too diverse to assume that the countries share such a similar "cultural heritage and colonial and other historical experience" that the impacts of institutional capacity is more or less constant.18 For example, all Sub-Saharan countries are grouped together, despite vast differences in cultural heritage, and historical and colonial experiences. Moreover, in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region, such disparate countries as Poland and Mongolia are presumed to share such an institutional heritage. These categories are simply too broad to be meaningful. *partie=titre THE IMPACTS OF INSTITUTIONS *partie=nil Using this regional lens, the paper identifies those countries that have performed conspicuously better and conspicuously worse than their regions as a whole. It then seeks to identify what attributes have generated these disparities in performance. Ultimately, the paper settles on institutions and governance, concluding that "it is the quality of economic management at large, as well as the competency and independence of institutions, that determines whether a country's mining sector can support and enhance economic growth or is instead likely to fuel deterioration."19 Due to the methodological limitations of the study, however, this conclusion is at once unsupported and unenlightening. The study employs a chain of reasoning that is entirely circular. We are told that the regional focus can facilitate comparisons between countries with similar "institutional capital,"20 but when performance differences are noted, they are ascribed to differences in "institutional capacity." For example, Poland and Ukraine are assumed to share a cultural, historical, and institutional heritage common to the countries of Eastern and Central Europe (whatever that might be). Yet the paper attributes Poland's dramatically better economic performance to the fact that Poland has developed stronger institutions and better economic policies, "albeit under very different political and historical circumstances."21 (emphasis added). Moreover, having identified certain countries as best and worst performers, the study employs highly impressionistic and ad hoc descriptions of their relative institutional competencies to explain why they perform so conspicuously well or poorly. No effort is made to quantify aspects of governance and correlate it to economic performance, and no competing explanations are considered. At best, the study proposes some hypotheses why these countries may be exceptional, but does not actually test those hypotheses. Ironically, the paper criticizes other studies for drawing facile conclusions about the causal relationship between institutions and the success or failure of mineral economies, without considering the "very specific country contexts."22 This is advice that the paper would have done well to heed, as no such sensitivity to local conditions is evident here. Even assuming that the authors' impressions of the relative institutional competencies of these countries is correct, the study makes no effort to separate the impacts of mining on the economy from the impacts of institutions and good governance. Absent this kind of analysis, we simply do not know how much of a country's economic performance is attributable to its quality of governance, rather than its mineral extraction. As a result, the study's conclusion that mining can contribute to economic growth in the proper institutional setting is simply unsupported. *partie=titre IV. THE (REALLY DUBIOUS) CASE FOR A WORLD BANK GROUP ROLE IN THE MINING SECTOR WHAT ABOUT POVERTY ALLEVIATION? *partie=nil The World Bank defines itself in terms of a simple mission: to rid the world of the scourge of poverty. Yet the paper does not assess the efficacy of mining activities in meeting this objective. It does not evaluate whether, or under what circumstances, mineral investments can be effective in reducing poverty and raising living standards. It does not consider how project level impacts on the environment, local economies, and public health can contribute to poverty. And it does not consider whether greater poverty alleviation benefits can be realized through investments in other sectors. Rather, the paper simply posits several ways in which mining could conceivably help reduce poverty, and notes that they merit further study.23 Instead of concentrating on poverty alleviation, the authors have chosen to focus their attention on the narrower, less relevant question of the relationship between mineral dependence and economic growth. The almost exclusive attention the paper pays to economic growth as an indicator of national progress reflects the mainstream of World Bank thinking on development...circa the 1970s. Since that time, the World Bank has increasingly recognized the multidimensional nature of poverty and the multifaceted response it requires. 24 As such, the World Bank currently sees fostering economic growth as but one of seven core challenges that must be met to eradicate poverty.25 Since Treasure or Trouble is so out of step with the Bank's own understanding of the requirements of alleviating poverty, it is only marginally relevant to assessing whether World Bank assistance to the mining industry advances its core objectives. *partie=titre THE DIVERGENCE BETWEEN THEORY AND WORLD BANK PRACTICE *partie=nil To provide a theoretical framework for its analysis, the paper surveys the economic literature on the relationship between mining and economic growth. It divides the literature into three groups--those studies that find a positive correlation between mining and growth, those that find a negative correlation, and those that produce mixed or inconclusive results.26 The "mining is good" studies identify three potential explanations of how mining could contribute to economic growth. While each of these is plausible, none provides a compelling justification for the World Bank's involvement in the sector. The first theory emphasizes "the ability of mineral resources to provide commodities that encourage the emergence of downstream local industrial production." While there is historical evidence to support this thesis,27 it is of little relevance to current Bank operations. First, falling transportation costs have greatly diminished the importance of local availability of inputs to industrial development.28 More importantly, even if domestic sourcing of raw materials can help facilitate local industrial development, the Bank does not actually encourage countries to pursue this approach to economic advancement. The Bank does not focus its mining interventions in countries that process their own minerals, does not seek to finance domestic production in mineral economies, and does not typically encourage countries to restructure their economies to facilitate domestic processing. Indeed, through its structural adjustment and sectoral adjustment programs, it often counsels against policies such as differential export taxes that might favor domestic value-added processing. Instead, the Bank tends to favor trade liberalization, and prefers to define the mining sector's contribution in terms of its ability to earn foreign currency by selling raw minerals abroad. Indeed, the paper emphasizes the potential contributions of the mining sector to earning foreign revenue.29 Since the World Bank's policies actually tend to undermine a country's ability to pursue such a development path, this potential benefit of mineral development does not support its current activities in the sector. The second theory suggested by the study is that mining can sustain and enhance economic growth in developing countries where proper economic management, governance systems, and institutional capacity are in place. So stated, there is little to dispute here--if mining can contribute to economic development, it stands to reason that it will occur where governments are accountable and well-run, and have adopted sound economic policies. The real question is what specific institutional and policy reforms are required. Treasure or Trouble identifies six: (1) privatization, (2) reform and capacity building for government ministries, (3) restructuring legal and fiscal frameworks to attract private investment, (4) improving social and environmental frameworks to support responsible mining, (5) strengthening partnerships with stakeholders, and (6) regularizing small-scale mining.30 The Bank's commitment to these reforms has been uneven, and some of the changes it prioritizes are of questionable value. For example, the Bank has been a strong advocate of rapid liberalization of the mining sector to attract foreign investment,31 despite the fact that the best performing developing countries have historically been those that liberalize only partially and gradually.32 Meanwhile, the Bank has not demonstrated the same commitment to truly inclusive development planning, effective revenue management, or adequate environmental, social, and health and safety safeguards. For example, International Finance Corporation (IFC) recently approved financing for the Sepon mine in Laos, despite the fact that Laos is an authoritarian country that severely restricts political speech, has virtually no organized civil society, and does not typically allow its citizens to challenge the merits of government initiatives.33 Not surprisingly, Laos also has a demonstrated inability to ensure compliance with social and environmental commitments on development projects.34 Thus, while the paper suggests that mining projects will only produce good development outcomes where good policies and institutions are in place, the Bank has not limited its interventions to such countries. It is therefore difficult to see how this can justify the Mining Department's current activities. Furthermore, this posited correlation between good governance and positive economic impacts from mining is greatly complicated by research which suggests that heavy dependence on mineral extraction increases the likelihood of corruption and authoritarian governance,35 and can otherwise constrain a country's ability to effectively manage its mineral revenues.36 If mineral dependence undermines the quality of a country's governing institutions and policy decisions, the Mining Departments prescription of "better governance" as the antidote to the "trouble" with mining appears facile at best. The third theory the paper offers to suggest that mining can contribute to economic development is that mining can bring new technology and innovation that can "create and support the emergence of a `national innovative capacity.'"37 This claim is contradicted elsewhere in paper, where it is noted that ready access to mineral wealth has historically produced a "rentier mentality" that "discourage[s] the emergence of entrepreneurship and the pursuit of scientific knowledge."38 But even if mining can bring some innovation and technological advancement to a developing country, the more important question for the Bank is whether support of the mining industry is the best way to facilitate the expansion of a "national innovative capacity." Opportunity costs must be considered. Given such other options as direct investment in education and training, or investment in more technology intensive sectors such as information technology or telecommunications, it is unlikely that mining investments are the optimal choice. Since mining can bring cultural changes that stifle innovation and entrepreneurship, and the opportunity costs of supporting mining as a vehicle for innovation, this theory provides scant support for World Bank involvement in the sector. In sum, none of the "mining is good" hypotheses offered by the paper provides a compelling justification for current Bank activities in the sector. *partie=titre THE PAPER'S OWN CONCLUSIONS AT ODDS WITH CURRENT BANK PRACTICE *partie=nil The paper concludes that mining is only associated with positive outcomes where there is good management of the revenues produced by the mining sector and good management of the mining sector generally. It further concludes that the need to build institutions to provide this kind of management is particularly urgent in countries "where the mining sector dominates an economy and where poor economic management and weak institutions are persistent features."39 Despite the paper's methodological weaknesses and its efforts to justify mineral development, it recommends a set of policy commitments that are fundamentally at odds with current Bank practice. While the paper concludes that good development results require good governance, the Bank does not limit its mineral sector activities to countries with adequate regulatory and administrative capacity. Indeed, the Bank currently supports or is considering supporting mining projects in countries such as Sierra Leone, Laos, Kyrgyz Republic, and Tajikistan40--countries not often noted for their excellence in public administration. If the Bank can sponsor mining projects in these countries, one wonders if there are any countries that have regulatory regimes that are so corrupt or dysfunctional that the Bank would not consider financing their mining projects. In light of its own conclusions, the Mining Department should refuse to finance mining projects in countries in which the government is incapable or unwilling to properly manage the mining sector and the revenues it produces. *partie=titre V. CONCLUSION *partie=nil Treasure or Trouble fails to make a persuasive case for mining's contribution to economic growth. Moreover, because the paper does not address how mining can contribute to the World Bank Group's core mission of poverty reduction, and because its conclusions are at odds with current Bank practice, the paper similarly fails to provide any justification for World Bank Group involvement in the sector. While the benefits of mineral development are elusive at best, the negative impacts of mining on human health, community welfare, and the environment are well-known and can be quite dramatic and long-lasting. Thus, when one looks beyond the narrow question of economic growth and considers these impacts on project affected communities, the case for mining's contribution to development becomes even weaker than that presented in the paper. *{ les notes de fin de document 1 "The World Bank Group recognizes the potential embedded in a country's mineral sector to significantly influence regional and national economic and poverty profiles." http://www.worldbank.org/mining/about/about.html. 2 Jeffrey D. Sachs and Andrew M. Warner, Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth, (Harvard University, Nov. 1997). 3 Terry Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States, at 42 (1997); Michael Ross, Does Resource Wealth Cause Authoritarian Rule, (April, 2000). 4 Oxfam America, Extractive Sectors and the Poor, (October 2001). 5 World Bank Global Mining Department, Treasure or Trouble? Mining in Developing Countries, at 7 (World Bank Group, March 2002). 6 The Mining Department describes its mission as "[t]o work with passion and excellence with our clients to promote a vibrant mining sector in developing countries." Treasure or Trouble?, at inside cover. 7 "Through its loans, policy advice and technical assistance, the World Bank supports a broad range of programs aimed at reducing poverty and improving living standards in the developing world. . . Effective poverty reduction strategies and poverty-focused lending are central to achieving the Bank's objectives. Bank programs give high priority to sustainable, social, and human development and strengthened economic management, with a growing emphasis on inclusion, governance and institution-building." World Bank Group "At a Glance", http://www.worldbank.org/about/whatis/glance.htm 8 Treasure or Trouble?, at 7. 9 Treasure or Trouble?, at 17. The only category of mining countries that the study found to have actually grown in the 1990s were those countries that use their mining sectors to source domestic industries. . 10 According to the paper, the three countries in this category--China, India, and Egypt--grew at a superb aggregate rate of 6.9 percent per annum. (Treasure or Trouble?, at 17). However, the gaudy performance of this category is almost certainly overstated. Most of the aggregate growth in this category is attributable to China, which the study says grew at the astonishing rate of 8.52 percent. But many experts suspect that the Chinese government has been systematically overstating its economic performance. According to these observers, China's actual performance since 1997 may have been only 40 percent of official government estimates. Business Week, How Much is China Cooking Its Numbers? (April 8, 2002). If China's performance has been so dramatically exaggerated, the performance of this entire category would have to be reevaluated. 10 Treasure or Trouble?, at 7. 11 Salah El Serafy, The "El Serafy" Method for Estimating Income from Extraction and its Importance for Economic Analysis; A Synoptic Paper, at http://www.eireview.org/eir/eirhome.nsf/(DocLibrary)/7728706340E063F285256B5F0059E09A/$FILE/el- serafy.doc. 12 Eugenio Figueroa, Enrique Calfucura and Javier Nunez, Green National Accounting: The Case of Chile's Mining Sector, 7 Environment and Development Economics 215 (2002). 13 Treasure or Trouble? at 7. 14 Id. 15 See, Amartya Sen "Human Rights and Asian Values: What Lee Kuan Yew and Le Peng Don't Understand About Asia," New Republic v217 n2-3, (July 14, 1997). 16 David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, at 179-81 (1998). 17 David de Ferranti et al., From Natural Resources to the Knowledge Economy-- Trade and Job Quality, at 62 (2001). 18 Sen, supra. 19 Treasure or Trouble?, at 11. 20 Id., at 7. 21 Id., at 10-11. 22 Id., at 20. 23 Id., at 13. 24 World Bank Group, World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty, at 6-7. 25 The others are, fostering growth that produces opportunities for the poor, investing in children's health, nutrition, and education, reducing levels of income inequality, reducing the vulnerability of the poor to economic shocks, promoting government accountability and responsiveness, and curtailing the danger of civil war. World Bank, World Development Report 200/2001, summarized in Ross, at 9. 26 While these studies produce varying results, there appears to be a marked difference in their scope. A cursory look at the data sets suggests that as a group, the "mining is bad" studies rely on much larger samples of countries, much longer time horizons, and much more recent data. As such, the "mining is bad" studies are likely to be more robust than the "mining is good" studies. 27 For instance, the exploitation of coal and iron ore deposits in the United States, Britain and Germany in the late 1800s were essential to the development of domestic steel industries. Sachs and Warner, at 3. 28 Id., at 3. 29 Treasure or Trouble?, at 19. 30 Id., at 15. 31 See e.g., Peter van der Veen, The World Bank Experience Lessons from 10 Years of Mining Sector Reform: The Road Traveled at 5,6 (April, 2000). 32 Dani Rodrik, Development Strategies for the Next Century, at 23 (February 2000). 33 United States State Department, Laos: Country Report on Human Rights Practices (2001); International Rivers Network, The Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project in Laos: Another World Bank Disaster in the Making. http://www.irn.org/programs/mekong/0502.nt2brief.pdf 34 International Rivers Network, id. 35 Michael Ross, Does Resource Wealth Cause Authoritarian Rule, (April, 2000). 36 Karl, at 42. 37 Treasure or Trouble?, at 3. 38 Id., at 8. 39 Id., at v. 40 See, World Bank Extractive Industries Review website at www.eireview.org. }