About

Biography

Jim Cust is a development economist whose research focuses on why natural resource wealth so often fails to deliver broad-based prosperity — and what can be done about it.

He is a Senior Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist, Africa Region at the World Bank, a Visiting Fellow of Practice at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC, and an External Research Associate at Oxford's Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies (OxCarre).

Jim's academic research spans the economics of oil, gas, and mineral discoveries. His work on the "presource curse" — the economic damage that can occur between a resource discovery and the first revenues — has been widely cited and covered by The Economist, Nature, and Reuters. He has also published on deforestation driven by oil exploration, Dutch Disease in developing economies, and the governance of critical minerals essential to the energy transition. His research appears in the Journal of the European Economic Association, the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and the Journal of African Economies, among others.

Jim has spent ten years as a Senior Economist at the World Bank's Africa Region, where he led research on natural resources, growth diagnostics, and wealth accounting across Sub-Saharan Africa. He was a core author of The Changing Wealth of Nations 2021, co-edited Africa's Resource Future (2023), and co-authored Mineral Resources of Africa (2025). Earlier, he served as Director of Research at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) and was founding staff of the Natural Resource Charter.

At the World Bank, Jim co-founded the Think Africa Partnership (TAP) — the Africa Region's flagship multi-donor trust fund supporting research uptake in policymaking — and co-founded the Chief Economists of Government (CEoG) initiative, a peer-learning network of chief economic advisors to presidents and prime ministers across more than 40 Sub-Saharan African countries.

He co-chairs an executive education course on managing natural resources with Sir Paul Collier at the Blavatnik School of Government. He holds a DPhil and an MSc in Economics from the University of Oxford and a BA in Economics (First Class) from the University of Cambridge.

Affiliations

• Visiting Fellow of Practice, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
• Senior Associate (Non-resident), CSIS Critical Minerals Security Program
• External Research Associate, OxCarre, University of Oxford
• Non-Resident Fellow, Payne Institute for Public Policy, Colorado School of Mines

Contact

Reach Jim through LinkedIn, Bluesky, or GitHub, or by email.