Can having too much oil be a curse? Or is being dependent on oil the real curse?

Since the 1990s, thanks to the insights of economists like Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner (see “Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth” [pdf], Harvard University, 1997), it has been widely accepted that having an abundance of extractive resources such as oil is a curse rather than a blessing: countries with the ability to score huge bundles of cash (a k a petrodollars) from the sale of oil and other extractive industries inevitably suffer from slow economic growth, government corruption, high levels of poverty, and authoritarian regimes.

For example, Sachs and Warner note that resource-poor nations like Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore thrived