Natural resources have been blamed for inducing slow growth and sparking civil conflicts and violence. This paper first develops a model to account for the hazard of armed civil conflicts as a manifestation of the natural resource curse, which is mediated by the quality of both economic and...

During the past two decades, Latin American countries have made pioneering efforts in reforming infrastructure services. The "first generation of reforms" encompassed widespread privatization, deregulation and restructuring of the provision of energy, water, transport and telecommunications...

The UAE is blessed with vast deposits of oil and gas. Contrary to other oil-rich economies, the UAE seems to have escaped from the so-called “oil curse”. We study how the UAE used resource rents to achieve economic development and provide higher welfare for the local population. We identify,...

Natural resources have been blamed for inducing slow growth and sparking civil conflicts and violence. This paper first develops a model to account for the hazard of armed civil conflicts as a manifestation of the natural resource curse which is mediated by the quality of both economic and...

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on oil and other point-source resource curse. We find that the curse does exist but conditional on bad political governance. Unlike previous studies we estimate a flexible econometric growth model that accounts for long-term country...

The 1990s ushered the world not only into a democracy wave, following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, but also into a wave of Fiscal Rules, where the number of countries adopting this fiscal regime steadily rose from only 10 in 1990 to 97 in 2009. Countries that depend on hydrocarbons,...

Economic growth in Latin America and the rise of material welfare has lagged behind that of more dynamic areas of the world economy. In a region prone to policy experiments, the policies of the Washington Consensus applied since the 1990s failed to bring sustained growth to most of Latin...