Natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from a bad reputation. Oil and diamonds, particularly, have been blamed for a number of Africa’s illnesses such as poverty, corruption, dictatorship and war. This paper outlines the different areas and transmission channels of how this so-called...

This paper proposes an original approach to investigate the influence of insecurity and institutional quality on international trade. We emphasize that insecurity is hardly comparable with other trade barriers such as tariffs because it does not affect all firms similarly. We develop a...

We use a set of established growth models, which simultaneously include human capital and R&D, to show that the effect of mortality rate in human capital accumulation is quantitatively more important than the effect of perfectly guaranteed patents on research. First, we show that the effect of...