Natural Capital and the Resource Curse
An abundance of natural resources is intuitively expected to be a blessing. Nonetheless, it has been argued for some decades that large endowments of natural resources oil, gas, and minerals in particular may actually become more of a curse, often...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Brief |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2012/05/16290781/natural-capital-resource-curse http://hdl.handle.net/10986/10042 |
| Summary: | An abundance of natural resources is
intuitively expected to be a blessing. Nonetheless, it has
been argued for some decades that large endowments of
natural resources oil, gas, and minerals in particular may
actually become more of a curse, often leading to slow
economic growth and redistributive struggles (including
armed conflict). Over the years, vast empirical literature
has addressed this "paradox." The literature has
had to rely on proxies for natural resource abundance
because of the lack of appropriate data, generating doubt on
whether results would be similar if direct measures of
natural wealth were available. This gap is now starting to
be filled with the data series released by the World Bank
(1997, 2006, 2011) on natural capital and other forms of
countries' wealth. This note presents an analysis of
these data to revisit some of the conclusions reached in the
literature on the relationship between natural resource
abundance and economic growth. The findings are in alignment
with the view that there is no clear deterministic evidence
of natural resource abundance as a curse or a blessing;
therefore, the effect on a country depends on other determinants. |
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