That’s the polite, institutional version of a distinction Farhat Bengdara has been drawing in blunter terms for years: there is spending wealth, and there is creating it, and the countries that turn resource income into lasting industries, services, and jobs are the ones best positioned for long-term prosperity.
Bengdara has spent three decades moving between the two sides of that distinction: as Governor of the Central Bank of Libya, as Chairman of the National Oil Corporation, and now as founder of an agricultural venture built explicitly around the argument he makes about oil money. His framework isn’t abstract. It has a Libya-specific answer attached to it, and it starts with a piece of advice he says he’d give any young economist trying to build something that outlasts a commodity cycle.
Invest in Your Competitive Advantage First
“Invest in your competitive advantage,” Farhat Bengdara said, describing what he’d tell a 35-year-old economist starting out today. “Every country has a competitive advantage, and you have to define what the competitive advantage of your country is, where your resources can compete with the international economy. This competitive advantage must be emphasised, and it must lead the economy.”
The second half of that advice is where the framework actually lives. “Always try to create the wealth, not to spend the wealth,” he said. “There’s a complete difference between creating the wealth and spending the wealth.”
The distinction, in his account, is mechanical rather than rhetorical: spending wealth funds consumption and infrastructure directly out of resource income, while creating wealth builds something that keeps producing after the resource itself stops paying. “If you are a natural resources country, like Libya, and you produce oil and you spend the oil and you do the infrastructure, you do whatever you do, that’s spending the wealth,” Bengdara said. Creating it is a different operation entirely. “If you want to create the wealth, that means you create something which is sustainable. It can be industry, it can be services, it can be whatever, but it’s something you believe it can be sustainable, can be continuous, and producing jobs for your economy and enhancing the growth of the economy.”
Both activities can look identical from the outside. A country spending its oil wealth on roads, hospitals, and salaries looks, for a while, exactly like a country creating durable growth. GDP per capita rises in both cases. The gap only shows up on the far side of the commodity cycle, when the resource that funded everything stops being valuable enough to fund it.
Less Than 1% of Dubai’s Economy Is Oil
Farhat Bengdara’s example for the creating side of the ledger is the one most economists reach for, but he frames the comparison in terms of dependency rather than geography. “You have a country with natural resources, which receives money because they sell the oil and gas, and they spend it,” he said. “These countries are blessed with these resources, but if these resources become not economically valuable, then these countries’ GDP per capita will go down, their life will change.”
Dubai is his contrasting case, and the numbers back the framing more precisely than the popular version of the Dubai story usually gets credit for. Oil and gas fueled Dubai’s early infrastructure spending in the 1970s and 1980s, when the sector accounted for roughly half the emirate’s output. An IMF discussion paper later put that share below 1% by 2009, and the most recent official breakdown doesn’t isolate oil at all: trade now makes up about 22% of Dubai’s GDP, financial services 14%, real estate 11%, and construction 8%, a structure built on ports, free zones, and an airline rather than on anything pumped out of the ground.
“They don’t have natural gas, they don’t have natural resources,” Bengdara said, “but they offered something which attracts international investors, attracts people from everywhere to live in Dubai and to spend money in Dubai. So they create an economy not depending on their wealth, but depending on something they offer to the world, and the world invests in it. That’s what we call creating wealth, not spending wealth.”
Libya’s Coastline Is the Same Argument
The framework isn’t only a description of what other countries did right. Farhat Bengdara applies it directly to Libya, and the application runs through geography rather than policy alone. Libya’s Mediterranean coastline runs 1,770 kilometers, the longest of any African country bordering the sea, offering a significant competitive advantage as the country looks to broaden its economic base alongside oil and gas.
“In Libya, we have natural resources, oil and gas. They make considerable income for Libya,” Bengdara said. “But Libya has to move to diversify the economy. They have to move to things which is they have competitive funds, for example their location, the coast on the Mediterranean. Agriculture, because they have water and soil, industry on the agriculture, so those things will be sustainable, creating jobs, growing in the future, and will produce income for many years, like they own the farm, for example.”
That last clause isn’t hypothetical. Bengdara founded Sohoul Agriculture in 2019, an olive cultivation venture built on the same Mediterranean climate logic he applies to the national argument: north Libya shares growing conditions with Sicily, across the same sea, and the operation now runs on more than a million trees. It’s the framework applied to a single balance sheet rather than a national one, and it’s built to generate income on a timescale that has nothing to do with the price of crude in any given year.
Competitive Advantage Is a Choice
The reason Farhat Bengdara’s framework travels beyond Libya is that the underlying pattern shows up wherever a country’s living standard tracks a commodity price rather than a diversified productive base. Blessed with resources reads as a stable description right up until the resource stops paying the way it used to, and by the time that shift is visible in the data, the diversification that would have offset it needed to have started years earlier.
That timing problem has gotten sharper since Bengdara first started making this argument. Oil’s share of global energy demand fell below 30% in 2024 for the first time in the 50 years the IEA has tracked it, and solar power alone met more than a quarter of global energy demand growth the following year, the first time any single renewable source has outpaced every fossil fuel in a given year. None of that means oil demand collapses overnight, and Libya’s own reserves, the largest proven crude holdings in Africa, remain commercially relevant for decades under any realistic scenario. What has changed is the size of the window a country has to convert resource income into something that outlasts the resource. That window has been narrowing for half a century.
The IMF has been making a version of this argument about Gulf oil exporters for years, and the current MENA outlook treats diversification less as an aspiration than as an active driver already showing up in growth figures. Bengdara’s framing draws a different line than the one macroeconomic outlook language typically uses. Rather than sorting economies by whether they export oil, it sorts them by what resource income is for: a living, or an option to build something else. Dubai’s oil revenue paid for the ports and the airport before oil stopped mattering to the balance sheet. Libya’s coastline and farmland offer competitive advantages that can help broaden the country’s economic base, illustrating the kind of long-term investment Bengdara argues can complement its natural-resource wealth for generations to come.
