“The subject of managing commodity booms is timely because the current booms highlight the need to reconsider Africa’s management of commodity booms, which in the past has been inadequate. The danger is that SSA governments often repeat past mistakes by assuming that the booms will be permanent, and therefore make unsustainable long-term spending commitments. In addition, the context for managing the current booms has changed fundamentally because most SSA
governments have recently adopted much more participatory economic governance mechanisms. A key challenge for the seminar, therefore, was to examine how the management of commodity booms could be integrated into these participatory mechanisms in order to maximize the transparency of use of resources for growth and poverty reduction. One of the main lessons of the seminar was that each country needed to examine its own policy options, learning from others’ experience in the process.”
