Oil discoveries can constitute a major positive and exogenous shock to economic activity, but the resource curse hypothesis would suggest they might also be detrimental to growth over the long run. This paper utilizes a new methodology for estimating growth underperformance to examine the extent...

The commodity price boom from 2004-2014 was a huge economic opportunity for African countries abundant in oil, gas and minerals. During this period their government revenues from resources grew by an average of 1.1 billion USD per year, and economic growth in those same resource-rich countries...

This book examines the role for natural resource wealth in driving Africa's economic transformation and the implications of the low-carbon transition for resource-rich economies. Resource wealth remains central to most Sub-Saharan African economies, and significant untapped potential is in the...

Are global incomes converging or diverging Despite recent empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis of unconditional beta convergence, this paper argues that such findings overlook the stark reality facing the world's poorest people. Many lower income countries, including those among the...

Major oil and gas discoveries are often associated with excitement and jubilation among citizens and government officials. But the extent to which discoveries substantially alter citizen expectations about economic conditions in a country remains an open question. The paper combines...

This paper investigates the characteristics of resource-backed lending across sub-Saharan Africa. To shed light on this type of lending, the paper presents new information on thirty resource-backed loans identified through publicly available information between 2004-2018. These loans are...