What's your take on the role of state capacity in institutions in terms of being able to enforce the benefits go to more than just a few elites?

I really think this, uh, the, more or less like a core issue and also like the deepest structural issues faced by many developing countries.

And Anabel said, uh, very clearly that different countries face different levels of institutional incapacities.

Some are doing better than others.

And I think if we trace back to the origin of all the problems, we call it a resource curse, um, without even more, very, very often really think about what it is.

What is the curse? And the curse to me is more or less like sitting on the rent of these natural resources, right? Think about easy portion of, of equity, money, loyalties that can be extracted from these minerals without actually learning Which is hard, of course, way harder than rent collection, you know, into this kind of, uh, extraction and processing refinery capacities and so on.

But of course, different countries have different level of capacities.

So I guess, Wei, my question is does China's rise in this and dominance of these sectors, does that offer any different development path for developing countries? Are they doing something different or are they following in the path of centuries of resource extraction history that former colonial powers did in Africa, in Asia and in Latin America? Is there something fundamentally different about what the Chinese are doing or is it more of the same?

What's your take on the role of state capacity in institutions in terms of being able to enforce the benefits go to more than just a few elites?

I really think this, uh, the, more or less like a core issue and also like the deepest structural issues faced by many developing countries.

And Anabel said, uh, very clearly that different countries face different levels of institutional incapacities.

Some are doing better than others.

And I think if we trace back to the origin of all the problems, we call it a resource curse, um, without even more, very, very often really think about what it is.

What is the curse? And the curse to me is more or less like sitting on the rent of these natural resources, right? Think about easy portion of, of equity, money, loyalties that can be extracted from these minerals without actually learning Which is hard, of course, way harder than rent collection, you know, into this kind of, uh, extraction and processing refinery capacities and so on.

But of course, different countries have different level of capacities, uh, in terms of transforming out of this rentier system.

So I guess, Wei, my question is, does China's rise in this and dominance of these sectors, does that offer any different development path for developing countries? Are they doing something different or are they following in the path of centuries of resource extraction history that former colonial powers did in Africa, in Asia, and in Latin America? Is there something fundamentally different about what the Chinese are doing or is it more of the same?