Hi and good day Dr. Awal.

Since nobody answers your question, I humbly would like to start the ball rolling. I may not give the answer that you expected, but I foresee an interesting discussion out of it.

As far as "rents from natural resources" is concerned, I do believed it was very useful for many purposes, including; further development of a country (in macro perspective), and purposeful investment in certain area (in micro perspective). 

However, there is a catch that (especially) developing countries need to take care of; i.e. consideration for investment. More often than not, poor consideration will resulted bad investment. In my humble opinion, the ecosystem for investment need to be there in the first place. This includes (but not limited to); stakeholders' competency, processes to be undertaken, tangible/intangible items to be ready, etc.

Therefore, the need for preliminary investment to set up the ecosystem is paramount. This is where "invest in investing" might applied :-) Well, I have bad experience myself while investing without firstly invest on its related knowledge...

The above is just my 2cents though, I might wrong.

Happy researching :-)

hairuddin

Dear Hairuddin,

Thanks very much for your thoughtful opinions.