WhereIsAtlas · Nation

Nauru

From the richest people on Earth per capita to a mined-out rock

Transformed — Strip-mined to prosperity, then to ruin — the world's cautionary island.

Nauru is a 21 km² coral island in Micronesia — the world's third-smallest country. Its fortune was literal: bird droppings fossilised over millennia into exceptionally pure phosphate, the key ingredient in fertiliser. After independence in 1968, Nauru nationalised the mines and by the mid-1970s its citizens enjoyed among the highest per-capita incomes on Earth.

The wealth evaporated as fast as it arrived. Strip-mining rendered about 80 percent of the island's interior an uninhabitable field of limestone pinnacles; a state investment fund was squandered on failed ventures and a infamous West End musical. By the early 2000s the phosphate was nearly gone and the treasury was effectively empty.

Today Nauru's economy rests on two controversial pillars: hosting an Australian-funded offshore asylum-processing centre and selling fishing licences and, briefly, passports. Its story is told in economics textbooks worldwide as the purest case study of the resource curse.

Quick facts

Independence
1968 (from UN trusteeship)
Area
21 km²
Population
≈ 12,500
Peak income
Top per-capita GDP, 1970s
Land strip-mined
≈ 80% of interior
Current economy
Detention centre fees, fishing licences

Sources

Related: kodak