Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop-based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. This article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources (those extracted from a narrow geographic...

This article uses a cross-national data set on the performance of government investment projects financed by the World Bank to examine the link between government efficacy and governance. It demonstrates a strong empirical link between civil liberties and the performance of government projects....

There is a strong statistical link between a country's civil liberties and the performance of its aid-financed govern-ment investment projects. But type of political regime (whether authoritarian or democratic) and the status of more purely political liberties do not appear to significantly...