Yet another interesting follow up to my "Lithium in Bolivia" research.

“Natural resources lead to an appreciation of the currency and that leads to an imbalanced economy because it's hard for any other sector to do well, competing with imports or exporting. You're selling off your assets and in many cases you're selling them off at a very low price. If you are taking resources out of the country and you are not reinvesting those resources in one way or another – a stablisation fund, human capital, infrastructure – then your economy is getting poorer, not richer, and a good accounting framework can show that. When you're taking out natural resources from an economy you ought to have a subtraction from GDP - a firm that held a resource and was selling it off would take off depreciation and that would show up in its books as depreciation.” -- Joseph Stiglitz, "Inadequate Mining Tax Will Lead to a Poorer Economy," excerpt from a speech at University of Queensland

Yet another interesting follow up to my "Lithium in Bolivia" research.