World Bank Data- Indicator "Total natural resources rent (as% of GDP)" and IMF grouping "ressource intensive economies"

[elenaa...@gmail.com]

I checked and I believe that the classification of the IMF for resource rich economies , where they group all countries with "total natural resources rent more than 10% of GDP" does not fit with data I found at the world Bank world development indicators dataset for the year 2008. Namibia and Sao Tome and Principe apparently only gain around 1% of their gdp through natural resources, however they are still listed in the IMF paper 2008 as "resource rich non oil countries". How can that be? Do they use different data sources or a different definition of "resources"?

Thanks!

Kind regards, 

Elena

[mrat...@worldbank.org]

Dear Elena,
Thanks for checking with us and sorry for the delayed response. Following is the response of your query.

Our Total Natural Resources Rent Data is the sum of the resource rents from the following commodities: Energy (oil, natural gas, hard coal, and soft coal), Metals and Minerals (tin, gold, lead, zinc, iron, copper, nickel, silver, bauxite, and phosphate), and Forests. 

So if our accounts do not cover the prominent natural resources of a particular country (e.g., fishing for Namibia), then our rent estimates would be an underestimate.

We hope this helps.

Regards

Manish