Venezuela has been in the news, with the arrest of its president, Nicolas Maduro, by the US. It has suffered decades of misgovernment and still has high levels of poverty, in spite of great oil wealth. Is Venezuela a classic example of a country devastated by the resource curse? Or is it much more complicated than that? It’s certainly a country which has been devastated by a resource curse, but the curse has also been a curse of mis-governance, rather than simply the curse of the commodity itself.
