Open AccessPosted Content
Institutions and the resource curse
TLDR
In this article, the authors claim that the main reason for diverging experiences is differences in the quality of institutions, and they test this theory building on Sachs and Warner's influential works on the resource curse.Abstract:
Countries rich in natural resources constitute both growth losers and growth winners. We claim that the main reason for these diverging experiences is differences in the quality of institutions. More natural resources push aggregate income down, when institutions are grabber friendly, while more resources raise income, when institutions are producer friendly. We test this theory building on Sachs and Warner's influential works on the resource curse. Our main hypothesis: that institutions are decisive for the resource curse, is confirmed. Our results are in sharp contrast to the claim by Sachs and Warner that institutions do not play a role.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Commodities, Natural Resources and Growth: A Survey Through the History of Economics
TL;DR: A survey of the complex relation between the production of primary commodities and economic growth throughout the history of economic thought can be found in this article, where the main topics investigated are: the apparent contrast between the theoretical advantages of natural wealth and the historical record; the impact of natural resource booms on the level of activity of other productive sectors of the economy; the different potential growth effects of the primary and secondary economic sectors; the secular trend and cyclical instability of terms of trade between primary and industrial goods; and the approaches to positive links between primary commodities exports and growth.
Book ChapterDOI
Natural Resources and Economic Development: The economics of land conversion
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined empirical evidence of the main factors behind land use change in developing countries and pointed out that one key institutional factor, the prevalence of open access conditions in frontier regions, could not be included adequately in the “synthesis analysis, as to date an adequate cross-country data set on property rights and land ownership conditions does not exist for developing economies.
Journal ArticleDOI
How an export boom affects unemployment
TL;DR: In this paper, a small open economy model that incorporates realistic features of labour markets is proposed, which predicts that a sustained improvement in the terms of trade lowers unemployment and uses a combination of traditional econometric procedures and the calibration of time-varying parameters.
Journal ArticleDOI
Resource rents and populism in resource-dependent economies
TL;DR: The authors show empirically that resource rents facilitated populism that allowed regime change whereby authoritarian institutions were created in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, in the cases they study, and empirically show that, when domestic production is predominantly natural resources, other industry interests are ineffective in opposing populism and preventing the undermining of democracy.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Why Do Some Countries Produce so Much More Output Per Worker than Others
TL;DR: This paper showed that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker, and that a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries is driven by differences in institutions and government policies.
Posted Content
Greed and Grievance in Civil War
Paul Collier,Anke Hoeffler +1 more
TL;DR: Collier and Hoeffler as discussed by the authors compare two contrasting motivations for rebellion: greed and grievance, and show that many rebellions are linked to the capture of resources (such as diamonds in Angola and Sierra Leone, drugs in Colombia, and timber in Cambodia).
Journal ArticleDOI
Institutions and economic performance: cross‐country tests using alternative institutional measures
Stephen Knack,Philip Keefer +1 more
TL;DR: The authors compared more direct measures of the institutional environment with both the instability proxies used by Barro (1991) and the Gastil indices, by comparing their effects both on growth and private investment.
Posted Content
Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth
TL;DR: The authors showed that countries with a high ratio of natural resource exports to GDP tended to have low growth rates during the subsequent period 1971-89, even after controlling for variables found to be important for economic growth, such as initial per capita income, trade policy, government efficiency, investment rates, and other variables.
Journal ArticleDOI
The curse of natural resources
TL;DR: The authors showed that there is little direct evidence that omitted geographical or climate variables explain the curse of natural resources, or that there was a bias resulting from some other unobserved growth deterrent.