ExxonMobil announced the discovery of two more massive oil fields off the coast of Guyana last month. If back-of-the-envelope estimates of around $5 billion of oil revenue per year are correct, that equates to around $6,410 USD per person—far more than the current GDP per c...

One of the nearest real-world examples of Oil-to-Cash is Alaska, which has paid an annual dividend to every state resident since 1982. One of the presumptive lessons drawn from Alaska’s experience has been that once a dividend was in place, political forces aligned to protect it from...

The President of Gabon, a small petro-state wedged between Cameroon and Congo, has announced that he’s giving some of his inheritance back “to the people of Gabon.” It’s a good start, but surely he can do better.

India is getting some serious cash from coal. According to official estimates, the government will get nearly $250 billion in revenues over a period of 30 years from the sale of over two hundred coal blocks to private bidders. Given India’s record of corruption and mismanagement of natural res...

What would happen if a country that struck oil decided to share the income directly with its own citizens? That’s precisely the question that Caroline Lambert, Stephanie Majerowicz, and I try to explore in our new book Oil to Cash: Fighting the Resource Curse with Cash Transfers. 

As we’ve shared the idea of Oil to Cash—that a portion of resource revenues be given directly to citizens in a regular, transparent, and universal dividend—we’ve heard a lot of concerns, such as that it’s impractical or that it’ll make people lazy.  

Donald Kaberuka, the President of the African Development Bank and the leading voice for forward-leaning economic policy on the continent, has come out publicly in favor of paying some portion of natural resource windfalls as a direct dividend to citizens. We’re pretty excited about this polic...