With exhaustible resources, can a developing country escape from the poverty trap?

This paper studies the optimal growth of a developing non-renewable natural resource producer. It extracts the resource, and produces a single consumption good with man-made capital. Moreover, it can sell the extracted resource abroad and use the revenues to buy an imported good, perfect substitute of the domestic consumption good. The domestic technology is convex concave, so that the economy may be locked into a poverty trap. We show that the extent to which the country will escape from the poverty trap depends on the interactions between its technology and its impatience, the characteristics of the resource revenue function, the level of its initial capital stock, and the abundance of the natural resource. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.