Total Natural Resources Rents (% of GDP)

Natural resources rents (% of GDP)·Neither end is better — this is a shape, not a score·Published by World Bank Group

We hold 52 editions of this indicator, from 1970 to 2021 — 9,235 rows in total, and 197 countries in the newest.

52 reference years (1970–2021), covering 126 to 211 countries, pulled from the World Bank’s indicator API (NY.GDP.TOTL.RT.ZS) and produced for The Changing Wealth of Nations. What a country earns from oil, gas, coal, minerals and forests over and above what it costs to extract them, as a share of GDP. ⚠ NEITHER END IS BETTER, which is why this indicator carries no good/bad colouring and does not feed its topics’ rankings. A high figure is a windfall and a dependency at the same time — the resource curse is an argument about exactly this number — and a zero means only that there is nothing much under the ground. ⚠ Zeroes are kept here, unlike the sector shares beside it, because a country with nothing to extract really does earn nothing. ⚠ The series stops at 2021. ⚠ These are not 52 published reports — see `restatedByReport`. ⚠ No rank is published. A POSITION is derived here (2026-09-10) by ordering the score LARGEST FIRST, and it is a SIZE ORDER rather than a league table: this measure has no better end, so position 1 names the country with the biggest figure and says nothing about how that country is doing. The change arrows stay grey for the same reason, and the indicator is still left out of the Country Index.