What Have We Learned about the Resource Curse?

Abstract

Since 2001, hundreds of academic studies have examined the "political resource curse," meaning the claim that natural resource wealth tends to adversely affect a country's governance. There is now robust evidence that one type of mineral wealth, petroleum, has at least three harmful effects: It tends to make authoritarian regimes more durable, to increase certain types of corruption, and to help trigger violent conflict in low-and middle-income countries. Scholars have also made progress toward understanding the mechanisms that lead to these outcomes and the conditions that make them more likely. This essay reviews the evidence behind these claims, the debates over their validity, and some of the unresolved puzzles for future research. 5.1

Acumulação de capacidades tecnológicas e fortalecimento da competitividade industrial no Brasil: breve análise empírica de diferentes indústrias relacionadas a recursos naturais

“…3 Ver Dantas e Bell (2011), Figueiredo (2010) e Marin, Petralia e Ortega (2012. 4 Ver, por exemplo, Ross (2015). 5 Ver Prebisch (1982).…”

Oil and the ‘new wars’: another look at the resource curse using alternative data

“…However, conflict, or conditions that cause it, can also impact the numerator, the rate of extraction of resources, which makes the question whether or not conflict can induce dependence an empirical question that is fairly critical. As Ross (2015) suggests, there is evidence suggesting that bad environments do not boost extraction relative to other economic activity but that it actually slows where institutions are weaker. Thus, the question of how exactly resource abundance and dependence relate to each other is critical to the choice of the measure used in studies of civil war.…”

“…For example, countries at peace, such as the wealthier countries, are more likely to have the institutional and commercial capital required for exploration and new finds of natural capital; that is, Norway is likely to know more about what resources are under the ground than would Bangladesh (Frankel 2012;Ross 2015). This might mean that development matters in predicting higher natural capital stock rather than the other way around.…”

“…The counterintuitive proposition that countries richly endowed with natural wealth do less well economically, politically, and socially relative to poorly endowed countries finds support in theory and empirical work in several disciplines, ultimately making up a body of literature termed the 'natural resource curse' (Frankel 2012;Morrison 2013;van der Ploeg 2011;Ross 2015). While economists argue that natural resources act as a hindrance against sound economic management and economic development (Sachs and Warner 1995), political scientists and other social scientists recognize that natural wealth affects the development of institutions that generate good governance and sociopolitical progress, ceteris paribus (Auty 2001;Beblawi 1987;Chaudhry 1997;Karl 1997;Ross 2001).…”

Catching Up And Falling Behind: Four Puzzles After Two Decades Of Post-Communist Transformation

“…), receiving natural resources income (rent), it is coded with 1, and otherwise with 0. According to newly established wisdom, "oil rent" is a mixed blessing, causing military conflicts, "Dutch disease" or the establishment and survival of authoritarian regimes (Colgan 2013;Luong and Weinthal 2006;Ploeg and Venables 2012;Ross 2015;Wick and Bulte 2009). However, the same authors emphasize that this is not an unavoidable outcome, but depends on other interacting conditions.…”