In line with the rising interest in harnessing natural resource revenues for economic and human development through productive government investments, this paper aims to address an important blind spot in our understanding of the "resource curse" by contributing innovative insights on how natural resource wealth impacts government priorities and expenditure practices. Using a large panel dataset of 140 countries covering the period from 1995 to 2009, we find an adverse effect of resource dependence on public education expenditures relative to GDP that is robust to controlling for a range of additional covariates. Furthermore, our findings indicate that this resource curse effect on the government prioritization of education mainly stems from point-source natural resources. These results are of particular importance for the sustainable management of natural resource wealth in developing countries, as they could achieve especially high returns by investing resource revenues in public goods such as education. While this paper underlines the importance of institutions and government accountability, our findings also raise questions on the role of the private sector as a partner in development, as the extractives industry could consider increasing funding for education through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives.

This paper extends the concept of the resource curse by studying whether and through which transmission channels natural resource wealth affects social spending. Even though the availability of vast natural capital reserves has commonly been linked to the neglect of human development, most of the literature has continued to focus on economic performance. This paper is the first to empirically investigate the link between natural resource wealth and public health expenditures in light of the hypothesis that resource wealth as a source of unearned state income enhances state autonomy and increases volatility, which leads to policies that fail to prioritize human development. Using a large panel dataset of world countries covering the period from 1995 to 2009, we find a robust, significant inverse relationship between natural resource dependence, and even abundance, and public health spending over time. The effect remains significant after controlling for state autonomy, volatility, and other factors.These findings have implications for national authorities as well as the extractive industry. Governments should be made accountable for natural resource wealth and correct taxation could provide additional resources, earmarked for health. The extractive industry could increase their investments in sustainable Corporate Social Responsibility operations, specifically in the health sector.

Availability of information has increased rapidly over the past decades. Yet, information on food safety is still considered problematic. Economists have extensively researched the effects of imperfect information. However, little attention has been paid to the institutional organization of the supply of information and the incentive schemes in the information market. This paper analyzes how and when information is supplied by media organizations, and what the implications are. We first develop a theoretical framework and afterwards provide empirical evidence from media coverage of two recent food safety crises in Europe. Copyright 2005 International Association of Agricultural Economics.

The authors thank Lalaina Randrianarison for her valuable help on the data and the maps in the Annex. Moreover, they would like to thank Stefan Dercon, Lodewijk Berlage, Patrick Van Cayseele, Frank-Borge Wietzke, Adam Nelsson and seminar participants at the CSAE conference hosted by the University of Oxford for comments and suggestions.