What factors determine the nature of political opportunism in local government in South India? To answer this question, we study two types of policy decisions that have been delegated to local politicians—beneficiary selection for transfer programs and the allocation of within-village public...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the Ghanaian economy within the context of its macro‐economic indicators and the performance of the agricultural sector against the backdrop of the exogenous economic explanation of the resource curse. This is aimed at equipping policy makers...

Purpose This paper aims to examine the dark flip side of the heightened dreams and wild expectations of development as a bright picture that accompanied the discovery of petroleum in politically unstable and donor-dependent Chad. Design/methodology/approach Data were elicited through local-level...

Purpose The oil-growth nexus is studied in a panel of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPECs), for a long time span (1960-2011), controlling for the specific context of oil production. Their membership in the cartel put them under a common guidance, which originates phenomena...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the “resource curse” problem as a counter-example of creative performance and innovation by examining reliance on capital and physical resources, showing the gap between expectations and ex-post actual performance that became clearer under...

History offers many examples of dictators who worsened their behavior significantly over time (like Zimbabwe's Mugabe) as well as dictators who displayed remarkable improvements (like Rawlings of Ghana). We show that such mutations can result from rational behavior when the dictator's flow use...

Purpose This study aims to examine the connection between political culture and public sector corruption, using the typology of Daniel Elazar, whose model traces the types of political cultures to their origins in various regions of England. Similarly, the “resource curse” concept, generally...