The interactions between growth and inequality in Angola vary greatly from what we would expect to see in other countries. The main reasons are due to the large oil industry as well as corruption in the country. The resource curse in Angola explains these abnormal interactions. An ideal position for a country to be in is high growth and low inequality. Despite this, inequality in Angola is one of the highest in the western hemisphere with a .59 Gini coefficient. Since Angola had such a high inequality, the GDP did not accurately reflect the conditions of its citizens. Angola was then seen as middle class and did not receive any foreign aid despite most of its citizens living on less than $2 a day the country. What we would have expected to …show more content…
On the Kuznets curve, one would expect to see an increase in inequality as GDP per capita increases. Once inequality hits its peak it will go back down. The resource curse, however, shows that inequality stays high and GDP has slow growth. This would mean that a country would not follow the Kuznets curve. The stated country would instead be on an artificial point outside of the curve which would not allow us to predict where the country will be overtime. In the case of Angola, the introduction of oil did cause inequality to go up but even years later inequality still remained at large and was still due to oil. According to the Kuznets curve, the introduction of oil would have caused inequality to go up, peak and then lower again. This would be due to more skilled labor in the oil industry. Due to corruption being part of the resource curse, inequality is not falling at the rate that it should be. The resource curse actually caused fewer people to pursue education. The resource curse shows that with an increase in technology, GDP actually grows slower. The Kuznets curve does not take into account growth rate which can lead to a country moving up and down in inequality but only moving partly along GDP per capita