Are natural resources a 'curse' or a 'blessing'? The empirical evidence suggests either outcome is possible. The paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources. These include that a resource...

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...

We consider the Hartwick rule for capital accumulation and resource depletion, provide semantic clarifications and investigate whether this rule indicates sustainability and requires substitutability between manmade and natural capital. In addition to shedding light on the meaning of the...

We reconsider the relationship between oil and conflict, focusing on the location of oil resources. In a panel of 132 countries over the period 1962-2009, we show that oil windfalls increase the probability of conflict in onshore-rich countries, while they decrease this probability in...

According to conventional wisdom, strategic natural resources like oil are harmful to international peace. Nonetheless, there is little empirical quantitative work on the link between resource abundance and interstate conflicts. Analyzing the impact of oil on militarized interstate disputes on a...

Rents tend to be relatively high in developing countries and also very fungible, so that differences in the scale of the rent and in its distribution among economic agents profoundly affect the nature of the political state and the development trajectory. This paper identifies two basic...

We examine empirically the effect of natural resource abundance on economic growth. We find that natural resources have a negative impact on growth when considered in isolation, but a positive impact on growth when including in the analysis other variables such as corruption, investments,...