Natural Resource Curse: Special Experience Of The Persian Gulf States

This paper attempts to study precisely the natural resource (oil& gas reserves) effect on economic development profile in Persian Gulf region. Health, education and political economic variables in these countries have been tested empirically as to what extent has been influenced by oil wealth. First, we will test if economic growth and development is positively changing with more level of oil and gas reserves in cross-country dataset. Second, we try to chase the oil revenue footprints by comparing development and political indicators in Persian Gulf with comparison of different subcategories of countries with non-linear correlation method. The main finding of this paper is that there is positive economic development pattern based on good performance in health and education variables in Persian Gulf countries but the sustainability of this development is a good issue to consider due to the high dependency of oil economies to a volatile source: “oil”