Abstract

This study asks whether natural resource wealth predicts national wealth. It puts the question to World Bank data for a random sample of eighteen countries over the period 1970 to 2022, comparing total natural resource rents as a share of gross domestic product, and natural resource depletion as a share of gross national income, against GDP per capita. Logarithmic regressions fitted in R are evaluated through coefficients of determination and residual plots. The models perform poorly. Mean R-squared values reach only about 0.183 for rents and 0.240 for depletion, the medians fall below 0.10, and most residual plots show clumping and other non-random patterns. The results therefore support the null hypothesis of no significant logarithmic correlation. Global economic conditions are too heterogeneous for so simple a relationship, the author suggests, and progress on the question will require finer-grained data, repeated trials, and nonlinear models.