For a growing number of countries in Africa the discovery and exploitation of natural resources is a great opportunity, but one accompanied by considerable risks. This book presents research on how to better manage the revenues and opportunities associated with natural resources.

Natural resources are often related to conflicts. The Dal B'o & Dal B'o (2011) theory states that income shocks affect capital- and labor-intensive sectors differently. Using sub-national cells covering the African continent for 1997-2010, I find that conflicts react differently to positive...

We combine original geo-referenced data on mining extraction of 15 minerals with information on conflict events at spatial resolution of 0.5o x 0.5o for all Africa over 1997-2010. Exploiting exogenous variations in world prices, we find a positive impact of mining on conict at the local level....

China’s provision of development finance to other countries is sizable but reliable information is scarce. We introduce a new open source methodology for collecting project-level development finance information and create a database of Chinese official finance to Africa from 2000 - 2011. We...