The EITI Blog

Historically, the natural resources of the poorest countries have often been plundered. The few have expropriated the many, and the present has expropriated the future. Harnessing natural resources for the sustained benefit of ordinary citizens requires that an entire chain of decisions, from the discovery process through to the use of revenues, be got right not just once but repeatedly.

George Soros has recently reminded us in a lecture published in the FT of the ubiquitous nature of the “principal-agent” problem. We can perhaps go one step backward to the core phenomenon that is behind the “agency” problem: asymmetric information.