Natural Resources and Economic Development

Economists and political scientists have long puzzled over why countries sitting atop vast oil or mineral wealth so often end up poorer, more corrupt, and less democratic than resource-scarce neighbors — a pattern known as the resource curse. Research here draws on econometrics, institutional theory, and political economy to untangle whether resource windfalls directly weaken governance or whether existing institutions determine who benefits and who loses. Identifying causality is genuinely hard, since oil discovery and political instability tend to feed each other, and the empirical picture varies sharply across regions and time periods. Active debates center on whether transparency mechanisms and revenue-sharing arrangements can break the curse, and on understanding why some resource-rich states — Botswana or Norway, for instance — managed to convert natural wealth into broad development gains while others have not.

Works

42,164

Total citations

332,299

Keywords

Natural ResourcesResource CursePolitical EconomyOil WealthCorruptionDemocracy