ABSTRACT
Economic growth has long been the primary marker of development, but its relationship with mineral economies has been an area of growing concern since influential literature in the 1980s and 1990s suggested that resource endowment was not as favourable as previously supposed. The term money rain' is drawn from research in Melanesia, where it is used widely to describe the unearned resource rents generated by the extractive industry that fall into the hands of the few. Mineral economies are defined as developing countries that generate at least 8" of their GDP and 40" of their export earnings from the mineral sector'. According to Kuznets' classic definition, this sustained rise builds the capacity to supply increasingly diverse economic goods' through the application of advancing technology and the institutional and ideological adjustments that it demands'. The statistics suggest that Papua New Guinea (PNG) suffers from the five macro-level preconditions of the resource curse to varying degrees.
