| dc.description.abstract | Socio-economic development of a country involves successful interventions that improve,
just the incomes of the population, but also the various widely accepted dimensions of human
welfare, such as child and maternal survival and access to basic needs (food, shelter and
education). Critically, such welfare improvements should occur across the whole country to
enable national welfare averages to also improve. A national government is therefore obliged to
ensure the delivery of the services that affect the performance of human welfare across the
whole country. While nature often conspires to endow regions within countries differently -
such as agro-climatically, a core responsibility of a national government is to distribute its
resources in a way that diminishes the impacts of the disparities endowed by nature, to the
extent that such disparities can differentiate human welfare attainments across the country. The
need to pay attention to resource distribution is heightened in countries where livelihoods are
dominated by primary production, as opposed to services or manufacturing. The ineffective
management of accumulated resources differentially undermines people access to private
goods, quasi-public goods and pure public goods. This perpetuates, and in instances,
exacerbates nature-endowed inequalities. Consequently, citizen perceptions and the realities of
unequal treatment by the government, and perceptions and realities of unequal welfare
outcomes, undermine national cohesion and integration. In turn, this undermines a flagship
project of many developing countries, the transformation of the multi-ethnic territorial state
inherited from colonialism into a viable nation state. | en |
