Dili, East Timor - The 2014 budget unveiled last week by tiny East Timor is a $1.5bn spending plan funded almost exclusively - 95 percent - by lucrative oil and gas revenues. One of the fastest-growing budgets in the world in recent years, it ballooned from $64m in 2004 to $604m in 2009.
That the budget depends on a single, finite resource that could be depleted in a generation has some worrying the country may fall victim to the same "resource curse" that has seen other developing countries lose their wealth to inexperience, mismanagement and corruption.
"Given how much money has poured through the country, and given how much money the government has access to, it's fairly depressing," said Anna Powles, an academic researcher who worked in East Timor for eight years as an adviser to the government and several non-government organisations.
East Timor is one of the most oil-dependent countries in the world, according to the International Monetary Fund. The country's non-oil industries, such as organic coffee and tourism, generate a fraction of the amount as the oil does.
A trust fund for petroleum revenues, modelled on Norway's conservative sovereign wealth fund, is now worth close to $14bn. Although no more than 3 percent of the fund was meant to be withdrawn in any given year, it has been overdrawn regularly in recent times.
"It's an enormous concern," said Powles, now a lecturer at the Centre for Defence and Security Studies at the University of New South Wales. "The whole rationale for setting it up using the Norwegian system was to ensure there was sustainability. It's not enormously surprising that it's been tapped into to the degree that it has been."
The 2014 budget calls for taking $903m from the petroleum fund, while the 3 percent sustainability cap would limit that withdrawal to $632m.
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