Professor Kwamina Panford will be disccusing his latest book, "Africa’s Natural Resources and Underdevelopment: How Ghana’s Petroleum Can Create Sustainable Economic Prosperity." As the title suggests, this book is on Africa’s major natural Resources—mainly petroleum, gold, diamond
and coltan—and how African nations can use these resources as development assets. It uses Ghana, one of Africa’s newest oil-rich nations as lens to examine the “resource curse” faced by other producers-- Nigeria, Angola and Equatorial Guinea—to show how mismanagement produces valuable lessons for new oil countries that are emerging in Africa and elsewhere. Panford relies on a broad range of fieldwork and actual policy making experience to suggest practical measures for using natural resources to create jobs, boost human resources and improve living conditions in Ghana and other parts of the developing world. He offers potent fiscal, legal and environmental antidotes to what in the development literature is called “the resource curse.”