The recent political upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa region have exposed growing concerns about conflict risk, political stability, and reform prospects across its societies. Given the prevalence of oil and gas resource endowments in the region, which a voluminous literature...

Fiscal indicators for resource-rich and resource-poor low- and middle-income countries are compared using annual data from 1996 to 2012. Resource richness is defined by export composition: fuel greater than a 25 percent share and/or ores and metals greater than a 10 percent share. Fuel exporters...

In low-income, capital-scarce economies that face financial and fiscal constraints, managing revenues from newly found natural resources can be a daunting challenge. The policy debate is how to scale up public investment to meet huge needs in infrastructure without generating a higher public...

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...

Nigeria's oil boom has not brought an end to perennial stagnation in the non-oil economy. Is this the unavoidable consequence of the resource boom or have misguided policies contributed? This paper indicates that the extreme volatility of expenditure rather than Dutch Disease effects are behind...

This paper develops a multi-sector, small open economy Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model, which includes the accumulation of human capital, built via public expenditures in education and health. Four possible fiscal rules are examined for total public investment in infrastructure,...

Much of the rural poor -- who are growing in number -- are concentrated in ecologically fragile and remote areas. The key ecological scarcity problem facing such poor households is a vicious cycle of declining livelihoods, increased ecological degradation and loss of resource commons, and...

Using growth regressions with panel data, this study identifies the determinants of economic growth, highlighting in particular the role of natural resources and institutional quality. The overarching aim of this exercise is to learn about the drivers of growth in Nigeria, and to predict growth...

Ghana's economic growth picked up in the early 2000s and has been exceptionally strong over the past few years, with price booms of its main commodity exports, gold and cocoa, and the initiation of commercial oil production in 2011. This paper examines recent econometric evidence on Ghana's...