Markets and global justice

Despite the great economic and technological progress the world has achieved as of today and the spread of democracy in a growing number of countries, many people around the world are still living in quite hard conditions. Massive poverty, malnutrition, civil wars and authoritarian rulers are some of the circumstances half of humanity has to face daily. These events are often referred to as the resource curse as such countries' wealth of natural resources has been pointed out as one of the main causes of the conditions they suffer. The sale of natural resources generates a flow of foreign money into resource extracting-countries that provides extra-incentives for all those actors powerful enough to arrange a coup attempt, encouraging events such as civil wars and the establishment of repressive regimes, and providing a fertile ground for corruption and severe poverty. In many of his recent works, Leif Wenar has discussed the current challenges of the world economic system. Journal articles such as Property rights and the resource curse (2008), Realistic reforms of international trade in natural resources (2009), and Clean trade in natural resources (2011), are all mainly focused on what has been termed the resource curse. Recent studies such as Ross (2000), Wantchekon (2002), Lam and Wantchekon (2003), and Jensen and Wantchekon (2004), have demonstrated the causal relationship between wealth of natural resources and coups, civil conflict, endemic corruption, massive poverty, economic dysfunction and tendency to be ruled by authoritarian regimes. Although we can find this assertion fairly paradoxical, there is an actual negative correlation between the countries' richness in natural resources and their economic, political and social performance.