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
Economics of Conflict: An Overview
TL;DR: In contrast to other economic activities in which inputs are combined cooperatively through production functions, the inputs to appropriation are combined adversarially through technologies of conflict as mentioned in this paper, and the effects of conflict on economic outcomes are identified: the determinants of the distribution of output (or power) and how an individual party's share can be inversely related to its marginal productivity.
Posted Content
Why Resource-Poor Dictators Allow Freer Media: A Theory and Evidence from Panel Data
TL;DR: This article developed a theory of media freedom in dictatorships and provided systematic statistical evidence in support of this theory and showed that media freedom is less free in oil-rich economies than in non-democratic regimes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Using Natural Resources for Development: Why Has It Proven So Difficult?
TL;DR: The challenges that are faced in successfully managing resource wealth, the evidence on country performance, and the reasons for disappointing results are reviewed in this article, with some successes (such as Botswana and Malaysia) and more failures.
Posted Content
Rural Windfall or a New Resource Curse? Coca, Income, and Civil Conflict in Colombia
TL;DR: This article studied the economic and social consequences of a major exogenous shift in the production of one such resource - coca paste - into Colombia, where most coca leaf is now harvested and found that this shift generated only modest economic gains in rural areas, primarily in the form of increased self-employment earnings and increased labor supply by teenage boys.
Book
Driving Democracy: Do Power-Sharing Institutions Work?
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compare four types of political institutions: the electoral system, parliamentary or presidential executives, unitary or federal states, and the structure and independence of the mass media.
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.