The book Best practices to enhance the transportation-land use connection in the rural United States by Hannah Twaddell describes a type of economy where the gross domestic product (the total economic value of the goods and services produced by the economy of a country or community during a specific period of time) of a region is - to a large extent - made up of natural resources. This kind of economy is a part of many different nations around the world and has several advantages & disadvantages like most economic models. It is an economic system that can be referred to as a resource-based economy or natural-resource-based economy.
Several economies in the Middle East are resource-based economies, especially those who are a part of the Gulf Cooperation Council or GCC (a political and economic alliance of Middle Eastern nations) have economies that are currently highly dependent on exporting oil and gas. Nations like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Oman are all part of the GCC & they have economies that depend on fossil fuels to continue on. Similarly, the Russian economy is tied closely to oil. As described by the book Russia's oil and natural gas: bonanza or curse? by Michael Ellman, more than eighty percent of Russian exports are oil, natural gas, timber, and natural gas. Norway is not as dependent on oil and gas, but it is still a nation where about forty-five percent of total exports are from oil & gas according to a report written by OECD - or the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development - in 2011. The nation of Suriname is one of the national resource-Based economies I could find where their main export is not oil. In this country, the natural resource known as bauxite accounts for thirty percent of their GDP, eighty percent of their exports, and thirty-five percent of their tax revenues. Bauxite is valuable because it is one of the main sources of aluminium and gallium in the world, so any community sitting on bauxite is basically sitting on an ore that provides everything from cans to foils to airplane parts and kitchen utensils.
Resource-based economies can create trade agreements and strong economic ties using resources to bring in money and extra resources from trading partners. While many of these economies are based on non-renewable resources, some could be hypothetically based around renewable resources, giving people a regular source of materials to trade for other resources or using it for their own community. However, this all comes with a bunch of obvious disadvantages. A resource-based economy like Russia becomes dependent on all the fluctuations of demand and prices on the item their economy rests upon. For Russia, changes in the demand of oil and gas determines whether the nation's economy remains afloat or sinks.