This paper from the Revenue Watch Institute argues that countries largely dependent on external sources for their natural resource supply tend to be less open, and less likely to publish their resource revenue and budget data. In fact, as authors Heuty and Carlitz note, according to the Open Budget Index of 2008 countries that are in this category tend to have an average transparency score of 31 out of 100—with 100 representing the highest positive score possible. However their perhaps more troubling observation is that a lack of transparency and poor performance on development indices are often correlated in countries with no significant national resource reserves.
To explain this phenomenon Heuty and Carlitz aver that many countries with large stocks of natural resources tend to make expenditure plans explicit (so that resource revenues are more likely to be transparent), and tend to publish information on where resource funds are distributed within a national budget. Thus the goal, they argue, should be to apply the same standards of accountability and expenditure control that transparent resource-rich countries employ in resource-dependent countries, through mechanisms such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Index (EITI).
